The Secret Diary Entries of Jenny Outerbridge
by Neftzer
Summary: From the secret diary of Setauket resident Jenny Outerbridge. A semi-outsider's view of series' goings-on. Written for sylvi10.
1. It is a code

Diary Entry of Jenny Outerbridge, kept secret and hidden

 _Setauket, late 1776_

It has been a warm summer so far, we are reasonably informed by the Almanack. The British troops quartered here are everywhere in their bright red coats, steaming in the heat. I much prefer the color of a blue coat on hot or cool days, and said as much at the dinnertable, only to be called down by Mama as speaking shockingly bold and out-of-turn.

It is a good thing Lieutenants Williams and Davis were not here, Father said. But I cannot see why an opinion of fashion and color should prove so desperately wicked. It is commonly known blue does far more to flatter any man's coloring and complexion than does red. Only now, of course, it is become sedition to say so.

Bess received an invitation to Whitehall this afternoon, to sit tomorrow with Mary Woodhull as she visits here in town. Bess does love nothing so much as to gossip and sew, and so she will be greatly pleased to attend. Upon receipt of the invitation, mother paused to note that Mary's little boy, Thomas, is coming on of an age that he should have a sibling, and yet no such news reaches us here. I could see in her face an indecision over whether to pray for Mrs. Woodhull's own health, or the health of her marriage - of which one often hears spurious, scarcely repeatable reports if one happens to be listening at the right doors and in the right homes.

Mr. Strong, of course, as I have written before, was sentenced to the prison ship _Jersey_ , and has left Mrs. Strong (Anna as we her acquaintances know her) to tend both house and tavern in his absence. But she is far more sorrowful than I recall her being, and though I can imagine it is the loss of her husband, it is far more likely the increase in work and - for all Setauket - the entire lack of jolly pleasures the summers used to afford us here.

What joys we young people used to regularly know in fine summer days and warm summer evenings, walking about with our friend s - down even to the water's edge. Not a fortnight of summer used to go by without a small dance or festival in the village, and some sprucing up of a gown for each such occasion. Lanterns were hung and we danced upon the lawn and ate a late supper of oysters and clam and all sorts of delicious foods among friends at Anna and Selah's great house. The church hosted socials for us.

Even the Outerbridge family - now too timid to speak 'good day' to our suspected-patriot neighbors - entertained around our spinet, our singing going out into the pleasant night air, carried away by the breeze off the sea.

I speak of blue coats, of the way they distinguish a man's countenance, the way in candle- or sun- light they kaleidoscope his eyes into something lovelier than they ever were without it, but of course it is all a code for you, Benjamin Tallmadge, of the coat you now wear, though I've not seen you in it. And I speak of summer pleasantries that I miss, but it is only a code for courting, which I may grow to be an old maid before I join in it again.

You did not take these things away with you deliberately when you left to fight. The sun still shines, warmth still finds the cheeks of my face, threatens the freckles Caleb used to tease me about until, as a schoolgirl, I cried. The King's men clearly long to court the village girls, they are invited to social occasions, and the town is swelled with single men.

And yet it is nothing but a sea of red coats everywhere I look, and I remain a girl waiting for a blue, whether its brass buttons shine or no-whether it be decorated in ribbons of military accomplishment and rank or no. Only and always, I am waiting - longing to see - if it answers to your name, absent so long now from my lips it is a wonder I can still find the memory with which to pronounce it.


	2. Late September 1776

_Late 1776_ (pre-dates original entry)

What a lovely new curtain Mrs. Stoddard has got from York City to decorate her parlor! The print is so charming I find myself believing I could look upon it for hours, imagining not only what the scene shown upon it presents, but the far away places the fabric of which it is made has been: the faces of those who stitched it, the hands that packaged and shipped it here to us in Setauket.

The Stoddard family enjoys it, I am sure, for the thing of beauty that it is, but I cannot keep from thinking about such a purchase in far broader terms.

We were there, Bess and I, calling to see it for the first time when a hue and cry rose up in the village nearby the front of Strong's Tavern. [Selah Strong has only just been sent away, we are told, to The Jersey and to prison for assaulting an officer of the Crown (and that officer shortly and most shockingly found dead, as I have written about yesterday)], and Abraham Woodhull-the husband of Mrs. Mary Woodhull-was there, opposite his father, Bible betwixt them-taking an oath of allegiance to the King.

It was most public (more so than had he been at the church or other meeting house), and I am not ignorant of the dark things some in the village have been saying about Abe and his part in Selah's arrest (and his own, odd release from that same arrest), but I must confess myself startled to see him declaring undying loyalty to King George.

It is peculiar, is it not? The notion that Abraham ought publicly vow to support the King in His Majesty's endeavors, when the King has taken no such oath in favor of His subjects?

Will the King work to defend and uphold the honor of Abraham and Mary's family?

It sounded of a vow of matrimony at one point to my ears, but a discordant, coerced one.

What choice did Abraham have? What would a man not do to avoid sentence upon The Jersey and forced abandonment of his family and property? What good, honorable father would not do anything in his purview to keep his child from such a fate?

Bess tells me not to be foolish. Of course Abraham-and all Woodhulls-are loyal to the King. Was not Thomas a soldier of the Crown, dying in His service? Does not Major Hewlett himself occupy Whitehall?

But, as with the Stoddards' curtain, I cannot help but see something deeper, less obvious, when I look at it. I see instead Anna Strong's husband-appointed to a revolutionary body-with whom Abe was assisting in that fight with the dead Captain. I see Abe, the life-long friend of boys with Brewster and Tallmadge for surnames. Surnames now synonymous in Setauket for rebels and revolutionaries.

And I remember a boy who could not bear to see a bully triumph, though he be bigger and stronger than him.

But what good is there to such a vow, if coerced? Doth such an oath hold?

If my father were to promise me to a red coat, require of me to accept him and stand up in a church beside him and speak away my future to such a man-is this a true troth of my heart?

What permanence any pledge, at that? Can such words endure? Words shared on a dappled hillock overlooking the water, when a young man destined to soldier in a blue coat spoke that he would never see a prettier shade of hair than mine?

How many promises might I have to unwillingly give before I learn if your vow yet endures? If those stolen moments of that afternoon weigh upon your memory as they do mine?

Will I recognize your hair, its queue so short a ribbon hardly did it service before you left us?

Will you praise mine, or will time have dimmed its shade and color, or a reluctantly-worn wife's cap hide it from your eye?

What would you have thought, Ben Tallmadge, to hear your friend bind (or perjure) himself so, declaring for a King you fight even now to depose from these colonies?

Would you have wished for such words of constancy to last? Or have prayed that they lived little longer than the air it took to voice them?


	3. It is Sunday

It is Sunday.

Sunday, and as a family we have lost count how many Sundays it has been since Reverend Tallmadge's church was taken from him and his parishoners, the pulpit removed, and made into what we are told is a barracks for the officers here in Setauket, but which we know better is a stable for Major Hewlett's prized horses.

But of course the Outerbridge family would no longer consider attending any service led by a Tallmadge. It would not be safe. It would, in all likelihood, be illegal. We are meant to forget the pride Mama had in that church, in the notion that some day Bess would be wed to some deserving young man inside a church and not just in our parlor - or backyard.

It had been a symbol to us all that Setauket was growing into a fine place, a proper sort of place with nice things. And now it is of course full of horse shite.

And Bess - should she find some man to marry - is no more imagined trothing inside that structure, her nuptials being blessed. And the name of Tallmadge is not heard here within this house.

It is Sunday, and Papa is ill. What nature his illness, I cannot say. He labors often indisposed anymore it seems.

It is his business, of course, this source of indisposition. We have no farm to support ourselves: but a large garden (for it being inside the village proper). There is the house, and then Papa's office. If he were to offend or run afoul of the wrong person, his business would be compromised, and even the shunning of a few, the loss of several clients, and we would be ruined. We are not self-supported. We depend greatly upon the opinion and goodwill of others, in keeping ourselves attractive to those of Setauket wishing to transact business. The loss of those good opinions, of important recommendations, and we shall come to naught.

As for Papa's infirmity, such is the outcome, one must intuit, from working so very hard to show the British how much you wish to please them, and frown upon their enemies. There is, after all, no respite from them. No way to wish them absent - neither from town, nor parlor.

Lieutenants Davis and Williams - for we are presently given two to quarter here, as our house is a larger one in the village - seem everywhere among us. If not them, then their clothing, their few possessions. They have either just left a room or are shortly to return to it. The scent of soldier about our home ebbs and flows but never wholly abates.

I cannot seem, even, to practice at the spinet without one of them showing up wishing to share a duet: Davis (also on the spinet), Williams on his flute.

It is Sunday, and they have gone. Where, I do not know, nor for how long.

It is Sunday, and Papa is ill and the Lieutenants are gone and Bess feels she had best sit with Mama and Papa.

It is Sunday, and I am for church.

* * *

It is our Sally B. who first told me Reverend Tallmadge still made an attempt to gather parishoners for services.

Not at his home - that would be too bold, too easily sniffed out. But at the homes of various others, on random Sundays. And not always within the homes of suspected Patriots.

For the Reverend was always well-liked and respected by the people here, whether they shared his convictions: religious or political.

Sally B. knew where he was to speak this Sunday. She had not meant to tell me, but her tongue slipped and I had it out of her.

Outerbridges were not invited, naturally. It seems likely Tallmadges speak of us as infrequently as we do of them. Even so, I meant to attend.

I was careful to leave the house in time for the usual service we attended. And I was doubly careful to dress as modestly and indifferently as possible (some I never wish to do): I wore nothing new or striking, I had Sally B. dress my hair as uninterestingly as possible. I must not appear memorable in any way. I did not need anyone recalling my being out, nor where I might be headed.

I did not expect to be, but I found myself frightened as I stood for a moment before knocking upon the door of the Waite's house. I had not time yet to lift the knocker when the door opened, for I had been seen.

I was let in, and paid my respects just as an invited guest might to Mr. and Mrs. Waite and their daughter, Constance. None of the guests (and there were more than several) remarked upon my lack of invitation - nor my unchaperoned appearance. Several appeared to kindly inquired about my father's health.

Reverend Tallmadge was there. I saw him from across the room. I suppose I have always been used to seeing him across long distances, as from pew to pulpit. I did not approach him, but waited.

I wanted to hear him speak. Wanted to listen to his voice, as I had as a child. For him to form words of comfort about our present position - the tone and timbre of his speech had always made me feel quite safe, as though things were right in the world when he spoke of them.

I wanted to know everything he had to say. (Certainly I would not be able to repeat this absconding act another Sunday.) What God had to say about what was going on in Setauket - and in these colonies as a whole. What the Reverend thought it was our duty to act upon. What he might know about - what he may have heard about -

I had not moved toward him, but he was abruptly (I must have looked away) in proximity to me and several others close to the front door. He was only milling among the small crowd, greeting guests. As he did so, I caught Mistress Waite out of the corner of my eye consulting with a house slave and I realized the Waites meant to serve their guests before the Reverend would be asked to speak, and I realized I had not the time to wait. Through a meal, through the men smoking after. Not time to wait a moment longer.

I took two steps until I was very near, very near the Reverend. I could have placed my hand within the pocket of his coat, so close was I. He took note of me, then, and his gaze came down (for he, like his son, is a tallish man), and he spoke some bland pleasantry to me.

"Reverend," I had planned to say, and certainly I stammered out some greeting, but none that even mine own ears could translate. My mouth grew instantly dry under his attention to my speech. "I greet you this Sunday. We have not had occasion to meet in - " and as I managed to push this out of my mouth, I saw his face pinch. Not in the way of a man that was angry with me as an Outerbridge, the daughter of (frightened-into-being) Loyalists, but as a man who...who was having difficulty placing who I was.

He did not recognize me.

Perhaps I had grown since last we were in close company together, perhaps I am so changed from the girl who used to attend his church, who hung shyly back as a child when her father shook hands with the Reverend on a Sunday following services. Perhaps his son had never thrown off his customary discretion and commented upon a favorite frock of his I wore, the fact I was also to attend a particular gathering in the village. Perhaps.

In the Reverend's reaction, I knew two things in that moment: that he would never share with me any news he may have received from behind Continental lines, and that I had made a serious miscalculation in coming to the Waites.

I stammered a moment more (which I did not have to pretend at), and then feigned needing a drink to regain my voice. He turned, most attentively, to acquire one for me, and I left the house without taking my leave or turning back around to see if and when he returned. I opened the front door myself and after two steps off their porch made for the rear of their yard and ran.

Ran through overgrowth on the back edge of their neighbors' property, stumbled several times, but never badly enough to stop my progress. Tall weeds and grasses tried to grab at me, and tangled into what they could of my hair and kerchief. I paid them no notice.

I arrived home and used our back door, slinking upstairs to my bedroom and hoping (once again) to avoid notice.

I had gone (foolishly, I knew it was foolish) wanting to hear Reverend Tallmadge speak as he would feel moved to do so. Hoping (foolishly, again) that he might have received some news of his son, and that he might (how ridiculous of me to think it) share it with me were we to share a conversation.

But I have instead left his company with an understanding that chills winter into my veins. Understanding that a man I knew once - a young man - might be now so changed, so altered by the passage of time and the aging of experience, of war, that he and I - should we again meet - would be little more than strangers. For while I, in my solitude, in my constancy, have cherished our moments, recalled and catalogued them here, Ben Tallmadge may well have forgotten them, and me, altogether. May have outgrown Setauket, outgrown his youth, outgrown any thought he may have ever had for me.

And in any future meeting, we may prove unrecognizable to one another.

It is Sunday, and I have never been so vexed to realize that I have placed my heart where it can have neither satisfaction nor peace.

Were I wise, I should burn these pages that outline my folly, keep myself from further indulging in it.

And yet, it is these very pages that prove my foolishness, and show the content of my misguided character, and so I know I shall not do so.


	4. Episode: Of Cabbages and Kings

It is with greatest effort that I strain now to catch my breath. My hand takes to unexpected flutters as I study to calm it into shaping these words, into neither spilling nor smudging ink.

I have gone out-of-doors once this night, the hour past curfew, in order to replace this diary into its secret location, only to have such an unexpected adventure that I must, of necessity, now carry it back indoors with me to record an account of the event while 'tis fresh in my mind, and contemplate a different place in which to keep this growing record safe and still-secret.

It is, of course, generally known to be a foolhardy notion to venture out-of-doors anytime after the King's curfew is in effect. And yet, with not one but two lieutenants quartered within the Outerbridge home, it gives the family not only the appearance of esteemed cordiality with those in red coats, but also, in truth, other soldiers do not bother to monitor us as they might others, thinking (no doubt) that were anything afoot amongst us, or in any way out-of-place (much less dangerously seditious) to be learned in our household, Lieutenants Williams and Davis would have long ago sniffed it out.

And so it is no challenge to discover that the night sentries tasked to enforce curfew about the village do not bother to patrol near our house, nor venture toward the shoreline that butts up against our garden.

It is also, no doubt, why my father's modest boat house (of which he has always been immeasurably proud) was allowed to stand, instead of being torn down for soldiers' firewood, though the dock that was once underneath its roof and the boat it housed were not so fortunate in their fates.

In truth, no matter Father's affection for it, it is a smallish building, with a low roof slanting toward land, though it boasts two small pane-glass windows on each side to light the interior. And yet, though we are not thought of much in regards to security concerns here, it is not a building in which to be caught at any time of day or night: for what good might one be up-to haunting such a building, now without a purpose? It is a hollow hull. An edifice without a floor (which the dock once served the purpose of). It, like so much of Setauket, has been made both ridiculously superfluous and utterly without proper function by the arrival of the King's troops.

And so, it is there where I kept my book. This book. In the cabinet among the abandoned fishing nets needing tending, the two hammocks my elder brothers once fashioned for themselves, and tried out (hanging them from hooks still in the strong supporting posts of the boathouse), on hot summer nights when being so near the water cooled the impatient, steaming energies of their later youth.

It is a high cabinet, unattached to others, and with its door shut, safe from rats or other gnawing creatures. In order to reach up to it, it requires my taking several steps into the water when the tide has come in, the skirts of my dress lifted high to avoid the wet (and the questions, were I to be asked; where I had been to get myself so very damp), my toes on their tips among the muddy, quickly-to-fall-away sloping bank.

Generally, I draped them over my shoulder, not worrying about damp encroaching upon my small clothes, which the skirts can well cover on my trip back indoors.

It was just so tonight, the glass windows giving enough moonlight without my needing a lamp. I was reaching my arms up to open the door of the cabinet, my skirts high and tumbled over a shoulder, when of all things on God's earth what should I hear, but low, near the water's edge, in a corner of the boathouse where less light shone, that unpleasantly familiar sing-song tone: "Jenny, Jenny. Her dowry's but a penny. And if you haven't any, and wish to marry Jenny, you'll earn your shiny penny, husbanding Miss Jenny."

Upon my very soul, in my life there is but one person I have ever known to chant that poorly-crafted rhyme. And though in his years at school he managed often enough to get the other boys to chant it with him, there was little doubt in my mind in that moment that Caleb Brewster was sitting low, near the water's edge, in my father's boathouse, perhaps but one-hundred foot away from the bedchambers of the house holding Lieutenants Davis and Williams.

And me, skirts over my shoulder, small clothes dripping, diary in-hand.

I turned toward the dark corner which held him. "What are you doing here?"

There was a sort of chuckle. "What are YOU doing here?" he asked, then added as though affronted by my appearance, "There's a curfew on."

It would be to bear false witness upon these pages to deny that Caleb Brewster was born to devil me. "Yes," I agreed, forgetting in my annoyance that my small clothes were uncovered. "There's a curfew on." No doubt I huffed. "For citizens of Setauket." I meant to imply that he was no longer considered to be such.

"Oh, curfew's not meant for the likes of me," he shook his head, even shaggier than I recalled it when last we had met. "Haven't you heard, Jenny? Liberty's been declared. I've claimed mine."

"A fine liberty, that," I still felt the sting of his rhyme even after years of not hearing it. "Creeping about in the dark." And then I lied. "What I had heard was that you had fallen off a whaling ship, and, like Jonah, now decorated one of those beasties' bellies, 'til it grew dyspeptic of you and would spit you up again."

He laughed hard (though he worked to muffle it) , and I saw the dullish glint of a pewter plate in his hands.

"What is this?" I asked in disbelief. "You are eating? On a plate, even?"

"Oh, aye," he glanced down to the plate, now empty. "Sally B. takes care of me. I'd take her for my own were I free to do so."

"Free?" I could not believe what he implied. "You mean to say you're engaged? You?"

"Well, it is a matter of fact that several delightful young ladies - and one fair rich widow - have at present valid claims upon my person."

I scoffed and rolled my eyes at him - whether he could see this in the darkness or not. "And Sally B. is behind this - this - rendezvous?" I stretched to think of the most shocking thing I might say - all the while hoping my book was not in plain sight. "Why, I'll - I'll see her whipped."

"Whipped?" he nearly sputtered. "Jenny Outerbridge, you never ordered a person whipped in your life. And even should you now, you'll father'll never. He's a good man, is Malachi."

"A good man?" I asked him. Was the Continental Army so ill-informed? "He's your enemy is what he is. If you knew how hard everyone in this household worked to be Loyalist - why, you wouldn't stay put here one moment longer."

"Worked?" he asked, as though mulling the word over. "Does it not come naturally, then? Or does King George now break his subjects like a horse to the saddle, for to be ridden?"

Something in speaking of my family so, declaring them Loyalists (as they declared themselves) - thinking of the decisions made by one (possibly two) Outerbridges for what they thought was the good of all, brought up a queer and unsettling humour in me. "King George plants his soldiers among us, in our homes - into our families, until I am no longer certain if they are the tares, or we are. And so many have given in. For what can we do here? It is too late to fight for Setauket, it is taken. You may have your Liberty, but we've none. We can't even run to the privy on a warm night."

The water in which he had (of necessity) been crouching sounded from around his feet as he stood. "Firstly, Jenny, I will tell you this: all have not given in. Would I be here if they had? In this war I'm not nobody, I tell you. And I work for Somebodys. Not everyone has given in." His voice began to show to me that his words had begun to raise a queer humour within him as well. "And as for fighting for Setauket? Every boy I meet soldiering, he fights for where he's from. Every one of us that left Setauket, Setauket's what we see - you, Pollie Donaldson, little Jemmy Greene down by the harbor...the town - the way the sun looks lying upon the water of a morning, the smell of oyster, the callus in the palms of our hands that we carry from the work we did growing up here: we fight for Setauket. And what's more? I say - no, I promise: Setauket's more important to this war than I have liberty to tell you."

His words were moving, heartening even. But I didn't feel deserving of their sentiment. "But don't you think, don't you think they hate us? Staying here, keeping meek in the face of the soldiers and all they do? Scared back into our houses by a curfew that the chickens hardly even keep to? Who would pledge to give their life in battle for those of us here with food to eat and shelter, and making alliances - pretend or otherwise - to avoid hardship or harm?"

He sighed. "Listen to you," he said, "look at you, Jenny. You're gonna have to try harder to be a Loyalist." And light hit off his teeth as he smiled. "Setauket has our hearts, Jenny - not our scorn."

"Why are you not with your family, then?"

"That's complicated. They're watched more closely than are Outerbridges. And they've no boathouse on the water. Sadly missing the old boat, though, I see." He was clearly dismayed by this. "Could've made use of 'er."

"What news would you have me carry to them for you?" I asked, knowing that with his father dead his elderly uncle and his ailing sister were all that he had left in the world. "The list of your betrotheds?"

"Oh, I like that, Jenny. Keep it up. Don't let a man get too comfortable with ye unchaperoned in the dark. Ah, tell them what you think would ease them most. That I am well and safe, and think of them often. If things can go to present plan, they shall know by tomorrow that I have been back, so it makes no difference when you pay them a call. But I thank you for it."

I pointed up toward the cabinet. "There is a hammock in there," and I gestured toward the pegs still in place for the hanging of it. "So long as you don't forget and roll out of it into the water."

"You always were a good girl, Jenny," he told me, with a nod and grin. This time when I saw it I thought - for the first time ever - I was convinced there was something there more behind it than just deviltry and wildness. We both knew I must head back indoors and risk lingering no longer, and leave him to whatever he intended to do further in the boathouse.

I stepped up toward the hinged door and walked through it.

He peeked his nose out after me, just enough so I could hear his quiet whisper. "And Jenny? I'll include in my report to Tallboy, on my very word of honor - how fetching you do look in the moonlight in your small clothes."

Caleb Brewster should be very glad that I am grown up enough now that I did not yell aloud and throw my diary book at the door, in hopes to thump him good.

But I cannot say that the notion of his mentioning my name in such unsavory context to a particular Setauket-born officer gave me any true reason to blush. Only, it did steal my breath a moment.

* * *

But what now? I have put this account to paper, and yet again it is something that must be hidden. I will not tell the Brewsters that I have seen him face-to-face, only that I have news. They will understand. He is their nephew, brother and family. They will keep news of him safe. Though they may wonder greatly at receiving such news of him from an Outerbridge.

I write to remind myself that as much as this entry may risk something for Caleb Brewster, its accounting here risks my own person seven-fold. I have violated curfew, I am keeping a seditious and illegal diary of treasonous thoughts and rhetoric, and now, now actions.

For I have entertained a Continental spy here upon my property, and I have failed to report his presence to the proper authorities. The moment I sighted him and did not raise my voice in alarm, my transgression was sealed. Our slave Sally B. has fed him, and I have offered him the comfort of a hammock for the night, and promised to carry a message for him.

What now, are such actions making of me?


	5. Episode: Eternity How Long

There is much conversation about the village these last few days.

Major Hewlett, the garrison's commander, has set his mind, we are reliably told, upon fortifying Reverend Tallmadge's church ('the barracks' as it is referred to by King's Men hereabouts, where pews have been dragged out into the open, and the pulpit-we are told, none of us having been within the sanctuary-torn out).

In these later days military fortification, in and of itself, would hardly be a matter of great note for the people of Setauket. And yet, it is the manner with which the Major plots to implement his plan that has raised the hackles of nearly every citizen to a height we have not seen here since...well, since ever I can recall, and I am to be nineteen next summer.

Not the landing of the King's Men here, not even the debasing of Reverend Tallmadge's church (I do still believe we were all still grappling with a confused numbness around that time) has threatened to incite such opposition to the King's representatives planted among us.

'Twas Bess who came home with the news first, in the form of gossip got from the very mouth of Mrs. Abraham Woodhull (Mary, as Bess may call her), daughter-in-law to Judge Woodhull. He, who has accepted the task of selecting which of the gravestones shall be used to safeguard the canon already placed upon the churchyard.

This horrid occasion has come about from what I well-know to be Caleb Brewster's early morning abscond (the night before recorded here in these pages), though many residents here declare the man in the boat (now believed to be a Continental advance scout) was too far offshore when he showed himself to be reliably recognized.

It is best, no doubt, that this has proven to be the prevailing belief. Caleb's elderly uncle Lucas Brewster and his ailing sister Livia need not find themselves troubled by soldiers thinking they'd any hand in their (long-ago departed from Setauket) nephew and brother now skulking about.

And certainly, despite any personal dislike I may carry for that particular Brewster, he'd no thought that his business here (whatever it was, and with whom) should spark such controversy, or create such an opportunity for Major Hewlett to once again prove how little our lives and cares matter to both officer and King.

* * *

Outerbridges have not long claimed Setauket as their home. There were none present at the village's founding. It was my mother's brother who first came here (and him not an Outerbridge but a Belard).

As a young man, Philip Belard had been apprenticed to a stone mason of Setauket, a master craftsman whose business was growing rapidly, and whose portable work was frequently shipped up and down the coast to villages and churchyards where no mason existed nearby to work upon their stone.

As the Setauket mason's business flourished, Philip's prospects in the world grew with it. He took a wife, Prudence Smythe. By the time Prudence was expecting their first child, Philip had convinced Mama and Papa to move Papa's business here, so that he and Mama might be close to family (other relative Belards and Outerbridges had not made the voyage to the New World, or had passed on from their time here).

And so we Outerbridges arrived in Setauket. I was aged six. Papa's business did well. He traveled to York City as needed. He built our house, had his offices attached to it. And then the pox came to Setauket. Mama went to nurse the Belards, as she had been ill before and survived it, but those were to be the last days she spent among her family.

They are buried in the churchyard. Forgive me, in Major Hewlett's barracks' parade ground. Not all, but a great many of the stones there were carved by the hand of my uncle. What were meant to be lasting memorials to not only the fineness of his handiwork, but to those people whose graves they marked.

I include this information herein, though most in the village could recite something of our history here. The Belards died, most of their belongings were burned in fear of the pox. The Outerbridges stayed on in their new house, their business flourished, their children grew. Their mother loved the stones in the church's graveyard-not only those of her brother and his young family, but also the stones upon whose faces she could recognize his handiwork.

* * *

Earlier this afternoon we were called upon by Judge Woodhull.

It was thought-perhaps for a moment-that he had stopped by (none could recall the last time this may have come to pass) in order to ill-advisedly inquire as to which stones my parents might suggest for Major Hewlett's project. For surely no others in the village have such a strong connection to the churchyard as a whole. Or, it was thought, in those moments after he was announced, that possibly he had come by to call and offer his condolences to Mama and Papa that such a thing was about to be done.

With his keen intellect and eager recall of local history, it would be folly to suggest that the Judge has forgotten my mother's connection to the Belards. Folly to think that he has misplaced his memory of Philip Belard as stonemason hired to carve his own wife's stone.

It is always possible that Judge Woodhull hears the ring of something French in the Belard surname that now distresses him. He would not be mistaken in that, and yet it is a truth that would have given him no pause prior to Major Hewlett's moving into Whitehall.

Unlike many in Setauket who seem to have early-aged into weariness and low spirits in the face of the King's Men arriving, Judge Woodhull has instead appeared energized by their garrison settling here. He is an old client of my father's business, and though he makes business calls to my father in his attached office, it is unprecedented in the last few years for him to call socially upon our home.

And yet I know Mama thought it an honor to have him here. No one in the village holds such a safe position with the King's Men as Judge Woodhull. His paying a social call she took (and others would take) as an approval of us, an endorsement of Outerbridge loyalties.

But it seemed to me apparent early on that he was distressed by Bess and my presence in our parlor. Or, if not distressed, disconcerted-as though we had foiled him in some way. Bess did not appear to notice, and chatted on at some length about village matters and, as it is often on her mind, the hoped-for possibility that Papa might someday sooner rather than later, acquire a pass by which she might accompany him to York City on a visit to old friends there.

But as she was starting to detail her aspirations for such a trip, I found something in my father's face I have grown more and more accustomed to finding-though not usually on display in public. A weariness, a reluctance of spirit. That is, what little spirit he may at this time have left.

"Forgive me, Bess," he interrupted her, something I have never heard him do since we were small children. The sounds of 'forgive me' so soft they could nearly not be heard. But his voice increased in volume and steadiness as he spoke on. "Richard, why are you come?" he began.

And at that moment Judge Woodhull himself, wearing a look I hardly know how to describe, other than unhappily determined, over-spoke my father's last words. "Malachi. Claire," he addressed my parents familiarly, giving only an uncomfortable glance toward Bess and I also in the room. "Will you come forward in a show of-support-for this necessity? I feel I can depend upon your offering no resistance to Major Hewlett's desired military objective."

The silence that followed his request was thick in several directions. The Judge had, by his uncomfortable reaction to Bess and my presence there (and his lack of including us in his plea) effectively censured anything we two might have to say or offer on the matter. We had been excluded from his entreaty, therefore we remained silent. He had over-spoken my father, the head of this family in his own home, a breach of social etiquette so severe it must surely speak to Judge Woodhull's uneasy state of mind. He had been exclusionary, and rude. And yet he was widely known to be about as well-versed a man in the social graces of the day as any Setauket man might be.

Of my father, he had asked an impossible thing. A thing of which no man happily married to my mother could ever do. The Judge had failed to even give lip service to the mention of his regrets upon the action he wished to take. He had failed to acknowledge that the family of this household might know best which stones ought be sacrificed if they must be so. He had failed utterly in understanding what he was asking of the family in this house.

And he had failed to apprehend something about this household that went into effect when Hewlett and his men first arrived in Setauket: we are Outerbridges. Outerbridges do not set the standard. No, they are built to follow it.

Had he arrived to call upon us with Lucy Scudder at his side (who no doubt would have been clever enough to offer her deepest condolences over what was about to be done), perhaps our reception to his need for compatriots might have been less silent, less stunned. Perhaps.

To the surprise of all in that room, it was Mama who spoke in reply to him first. "It is said this man-this suspected Continental Scout-that has the Major so concerned was naught but Caleb Brewster, come back home for an ill-timed visit. How can there be such a great need to fortify the Major's-" her words stuck a bit here, but she got through them, "barracks from a Setauket boy?"

I was close enough to Judge Woodhull to apprehend the sweat that began to stick out on his upper lip and forehead, so much he disliked this subject. He shook his head. "Caleb Brewster is more than likely passed out from drink on the deck of a whaleboat off Greenland, Claire," he said, and made quite an effort, it seemed to me, to laugh, but as no one joined in with him he grew grave, and cautionary. "And if he is not," he added, his disposition bottoming out to mimic ours, "let us pray for the sake of Lucas and Livia this speculative gossip never reaches any of the soldiers' ears. Much less those of Major Hewlett."

No one spoke in reply. It was not like the Judge to speak so plainly, nor to remind anyone (much less seem to contemplate it himself) how close to the edge of disaster certain families in Setauket lived. (And, by his tone, how he still took care for them.)

It must have been this that emboldened me.

"Will you take Belard stones," I asked, and my eyes flicked over to Mama. "Prudence, and the baby?"

My father said nothing. His gaze was cold, and I knew his mind and tongue at war with each other. He could not afford to speak when his words were not yet formed, and the Judge such an important man to Major Hewlett.

Judge Woodhull looked to my father. "Malachi," he began, perhaps in the hopes of offering another appeal, but he stopped, and looked back to me. "It seems," he said, "I will have no stones to present the Major, as I...as I..." but he did not finish.

Silence again, with no one moving, either. Stillness, into which my father finally said, "Many of the stones in that yard bear the work of my wife's brother's hand." He of course did not need to remind any present of this fact.

"Then, even after the Major culls his, you will have many left to cherish," Judge Woodhull attempted to counter, but slowly, and with proper reverence in his tone now to the subject at hand.

"Would you say that to Job of his children?" my father asked. "That though he lost all the first, he had then still the last?"

"You equate gravestones with children?" the Judge's voice was low, but yet incredulous at the analogy.

"Children are a legacy, Judge," Papa said, refraining from using the Richard Woodhull's Christian name. "Those stones are the Belard legacy. They are all my wife has left of her family. I cannot ask her to abandon that anymore than she would ask me to abandon our children. And I cannot in good conscience agree to helping you in your political need at the expense of her familial one." Papa looked as though he might be sick in the speaking of this.

"But the town needs them for protection," I do not know if the Judge believed this when he said it. It may have merely been a final attempt to strengthen his plea.

"I cannot believe Setauket needs protection from its own people," Papa said, quietly, and with great effort.

Mama rose slowly, elegantly as always, and signaled that she wished to excuse herself and retire, and that Bess and I were to join her.

Papa and the Judge stood and observed the required social graces as we left the room.

I do not know what the ultimate outcome of any further discussion was.

* * *

It is now the fourth day since Major Hewlett demanded his stones. And all is resolved, all mended between Judge Woodhull and the town. I do not know what Papa may or may not have agreed to in that room alone with the Judge; the Outerbridges stayed at home the morning Judge Woodhull was to announce his list, and have only heard what transpired second-hand.

How Judge Woodhull dug up the stone of his own son, Thomas, to give to Major Hewlett. How others followed his example. Mama has tried not to hear which stones were unearthed. She would rather not know. Nor do I think she ever plans to look at the church atop the hill again. Her eye, one assumes, will now search out the water instead.

I do not know if it will be drawn to that distant shore where it is well-known Continentals make camp.

And I find I am left with this question: _Would a certain Captain in the Connecticut Dragoons take a spade to his mother's stone in order to fortify the earthenworks if Setauket were held by Continentals needing to protect it from the British? Would Caleb Brewster freely offer the stones of his parents for such an enterprise?_

Do we citizens of Setauket despise the 'necessity' of this extreme action, or protest so against it because it is only the worst and most-recent imposition from this garrison of soldiers who hold us in little or no regard, and daily treat us so? Would the King's Men, for example, have taken stones from an Anglican churchyard?

Would I hesitate if I believed (truly, wholly believed) tearing a gravestone-just a stone-from the earth might bring him back again, and safely? Even that of the wee Belard babe, my cousin?

Would such an action shock so deeply or feel so perverse if it were in service to other men-Setauket men-American men-and the protection of their lives, and our liberty?

It is a question I shall never ask my mother.


	6. Episode: Pt I Epiphany

_Christmas season - 1776_

We hear nothing of the war. It is presumed by most that any fighting will cease until better weather arrives with the Spring, and each army's troops may march and battle in fairer weather.

Though I may say I enjoy reading for both pleasure and enrichment, I have spent no time at all with military texts, and very little with contemporaneous accounts of the soldiering life, and I therefore must take others' opinions upon the subject as fact.

It is a topic, one presumes, might spark conversation from one of the lieutenants quartered here with us in the house. Should one such as I wish to engage either man in conversation. Perhaps I shall suggest it as a topic to Bess. She is in want of lively company, always, and so spends a great deal of her time alone assembling lists of conversational topics both acceptable and most likely to spur on further interaction.

As for me, certainly I enjoy visiting, and the energetic exchange of ideas among people well-suited to enjoying one another's company. But I find more and more one need offer no opening question or even salutation in order to get our resident lieutenants talking. They gossip like fishermen at the docks, and when they are not speaking of their own self-importance they are more than happy to speak of another's lack. To begin such speeches, they require no encouragement.

It was last night, later than ought be, I will confess, that I was up and still about the main rooms of the house. The sitting room of a night is always lit by at least two lamps (Sally B sees to it) should the lieutenants return unexpectedly (which is not uncommon), and our home must be kept at their beck and call.

As I was up, and two of our lamps wasting oil just down-the-stairs, I thought to take myself down there and make use of them, and the empty (but yet fire-upon-the-hearth) sitting room, rather than burn another lamp in my bed chamber.

Having laid aside my book, and looking over the needlework I was by-turns working upon (it needed more than a few stitches picked-out and re-done), I was seated near the fire in a comfortable chair, the sides and back of the chair keeping out draft as sitting upon a sofa alone never will.

Without so much as a knock for a servant at the front door to announce his arrival, Lieutenant Davis pushed in, staggered a bit (not closing the door with any dispatch), and stumbled into the sitting room.

His eyes did not register surprise upon seeing me there at that hour, though he seemed pleased to see me. He began to speak.

It would seem, from his accounting of events, that the girl he had hoped to marry back in England has sent him a letter telling him that due to it being unlikely that he shall sail home to her any time soon, and may very well instead be killed fighting here in the colonies, that she no longer considers them affianced.

And so she has broken Lieutenant Davis' heart. As he told me.

And in response, he has gotten himself quite drunk on whatever they were serving in glasses at Whitehall. It would seem he left there before it was apprehended by any of his superiors quite how drunken he was, or the nature of his despair.

I am not accustomed to being very often around drunkenness, although before the garrison came one did witness it in men at festivals and village celebrations-sometimes just by being in close enough proximity to the tavern. And I am less familiar with seeing a man weep.

But Lieutenant Davis did weep, with great phlegm- and spittle-fueled sobs. He smelled of a broke-open barrel of spirits. His weeping at times made it difficult to understand what he spoke of, other than that it seemed to be his love for and disappointment in the girl who had sent him the letter.

At one point I saw Sally B about to enter the room (not knowing I was there) to see what the lieutenant might be most in need of, but finding me there, she took two steps backward without turning about, and left again.

At seeing this, I attempted to rise and excuse myself from his company.

But before I was fully out of the chair, here was Lieutenant Davis on his knees at my feet. Begging, imploring something of me.

Still, I wanted to stand. I very much wanted to stand.

My hands were in my lap, holding the needlework. I moved them to lay it down upon a nearby table, and he suddenly had them in his.

"Oh, Miss Jenny," he said-clearer than nearly anything he had spoken thus far. "You are a good girl, are you not? You would not treat a man that loved you so!" He looked up for a moment as he said this, and then his face came down toward my hands (which he had caught up in his own) and he was kissing them.

Kissing my hands fervently, and perhaps but an inch away from his face and head resting in my lap. And still weeping.

My mind did not immediately suggest any course of action to me, other than telling me again that I had no wish to be used as a handkerchief by a jilted man in a red coat who had the right to live in my family's home without invitation or obligation of payment.

I had no wish to comfort him in his distress. So unfitting was everything about his person, so surprising the liberty he had taken in putting his hands and kisses upon me, he hardly seemed real to me. The entire scene struck me as imaginary, illusory.

And yet I could not ignore the weight in my lap. The notion that this befuddled person wished to pair me as the opposing positive to his (former) girl back in England. I began to try and shift at least one hand out of his grip so that it might be tasked with searching for the needle sure to be still stuck to the needlepoint's fabric, thinking an 'accidental' prick might just sober him up enough for me to exit the room.

"Lieutenant," I heard a voice: strong, in-charge, announce from the doorway.

Amazingly, it was Mama. She did not add the lieutenant's surname, perhaps thinking to do so would rob her of some of the staccato authority of her abrupt address. "You are unwell. Cleopas," she said, meaning our man, "will see you to your chamber, and any needs you might have. It has grown late."

I could see one of her hands upon the door frame, but not the other. She was dressed as though it were day, though without the usual care for perfection one could expect from her toilet.

Lieutenant Davis had straightened his back, releasing his hold upon my hands and removing the weight of his head from my lap, allowing me to stand, which I did without pause, and making no goodnights, turned with all speed (yet still walking) and exited the room for the stairs.

I was surprised to find myself laboring to breathe normally. And yet I did not wish to dally upon the steps. I felt very much I wished a door-at least-between Lieutenant Davis and myself. When I arrived at my door, I felt someone behind me.

It was Mama. "You will sleep in with Bess tonight," she told me, and when I did finally see the other hand she had concealed from Lieutenant Davis, I saw that she had Cook's best kitchen knife in it. She made no attempt to hide it from me, yet nor did she brandish it as though it made her feel powerful.

Obediently I kissed her, for I am young, but not too foolish to understand that without her intrusion, or my own potential action in finding that needle, nothing of good would have come of the situation we'd both escaped.

I went in to join a sleeping Bess in her bed, and heard the legs of a chair being dragged across the passageway and in front of the bedroom door. And then I heard Mama sit down in it, and imagined the weight of that knife resting upon her lap.

* * *

I say I've little familiarity with drunkenness. Which is true enough. But there was a time, a time before soldiers, when ale on the breath of respectable young men was common enough, when festival punch gained a bite to it whether its makers placed it in the mix or no.

When I was fifteen, Bess and I were allowed to attend Oyster Bay's late-spring festival. We were to spend several nights before and after at the home of a friend of my mother's, in whose care we were to be left.

Bess had been to dances and country socials before, being older than me by almost two years, but I had only just begun to be permitted to join in such things as a young woman, and not simply a girl child growing too quickly out of her dresses.

It was to be an informal occasion, held out-of-doors, the dancing to happen in a spot cleared for it among a shading of trees hung with lanterns. It looked to me like a fairy world, those lights twinkling between the coming-on spring leaves and blossoms. Everyone was excited to be there, to be out of the indoors that had kept us locked up for the winter, save necessary chores.

And Oyster Bay! It seemed a different country to me entirely. The acquaintances we should make! The connections! The new faces we should see and opinions we should hear! And though, of course, Setauket folk were everywhere (such festivals and chances for society being few enough in the countryside of our humble colony), I could not be convinced otherwise of this chance to broaden my world.

We were introduced by Mama's friends to their acquaintances that early evening. Among them, a relation of Setauket's Lucy Scudder; Daniel Scudder, aged nineteen, of whom we had some small recollection from years earlier when he had visited the village to see his aunt. Though he was closer in age to Bess, it was I he fell in walking beside.

I have said the occasion was an informal one, countrified in its simplicity. This extended to chaperones as well. The young people in attendance gathered together largely to one side of the clearing, a few older ladies seated on benches carried out for just such a purpose here and there, but we were largely left to ourselves-so long as we stayed with the group and did not attempt to wander off alone-or in twosomes.

I felt Bess' elbow dig into my side and followed her eyes to where she had seen Abraham Woodhull and Anna Strong, who had also traveled to attend the gathering. Anna was fetching to look at in a well-fitted frock, and there were many women in Setauket who wondered when news of an engagement might be announced. She kept herself to the side of Abraham, and it was obvious to spy the other young men look away, frustrated that her interest lay elsewhere, when their rival had neither height nor beauty of his own to recommend him.

"It shall be a good match," Bess assured me in a whisper, "they have been close since they were children. And their families share friendship."

And then Bess' breath caught a second time, as the third person in the Woodhull-Strong party turned around. It was Thomas Woodhull, always a particular favorite of Bess', though their paths had seldom crossed socially, and they were not much close in age. And yet, Thomas was always thought to be a fine example of a Setauket young man with a future. And he wore his clothes well, and took care with his queue. As he was on a leave from soldiering for the moment, he did not wear his uniform. No doubt this kept Bess' sighing shorter than it might have been otherwise.

"I see there shall be an exchange of opinions this night," Daniel Scudder announced from the other side of me. Had he been anything but a previous acquaintance I daresay I should have been too overcome with being impressed by myself for catching a young man to walk about with me at only fifteen that I would not have been able to look at him, much less reply.

But he was not so foreign to me, and the night and anticipation of it was making me bold. "How do you mean?" I asked.

"Tallmadges," was all he said, and inclined his head back toward Abraham Woodhull who had gone toward one of the tables set up with drinks and sweet foods.

Sure enough, there, beside him as they selected cups for the punch, were Samuel and Benjamin Tallmadge. Samuel, closer in age to me and a former schoolmate, looked my way and saucily gave me a wink and a nod showing he noted that I had already found a partner, whose arm I was presently on.

I felt my nose wrinkle in annoyance, rather than in a becomingly ladylike blush. I knew Samuel too well to see him for anything other than the friendly boy he was. I had not meant to react so-anyone could be watching!-when I saw his elder brother's head tick down, and he spoke to Sam.

 _Did I see his head jerk toward me? Had I really pulled that face? Now? On this night? When I had made certain to be dressed perfectly? My hair without flaw or fault?_ _My skin as close to perfection as all my recent attentions to it might make it?_ And here was a man-a _man_ -asking for help in identifying me (for I could imagine no other conversation occurring between them) and being told, 'yes, that's Jenny Outerbridge, _baby_ Jenny Outerbridge, you remember her-she'll stick her tongue out at you and kick your shin. ' _Her dowry's but a penny. And if you haven't any, and wish to marry Jenny, you'll earn your shiny penny, husbanding Miss Jenny._ ' Yes, THAT Jenny Outerbridge. Imagine her being allowed to come here.'

Ugh. As we walked on and the trees' overhang obscured them from view, I attempted to forget my slip-up.

"Reverend Tallmadge's oldest son is to be a schoolmaster," Bess was saying to Daniel. "I cannot rightly recall just where at the moment, though."

"Would that you could, Miss Outerbridge," Daniel said. "For he speaks sedition as like as his father, and no village ought give such a voice room to be heard, be it from reverend or school master."

Well, this did take me back a moment. The notion that Reverend Tallmadge ought be called out for his beliefs was not one I was familiar with. Nor that there was anything shameful or wrong in his public convictions. He was our minister, and the highest respect was all that I had ever been taught to afford him.

Bess, being the excellent conversationalist that she is (even at seventeen) quickly steered the talk away from sedition, and into less shocking waters, while I grew impatient waiting for someone to begin to play for the dance.

At some point, Daniel asked me to reserve several dances for him, before dismissing himself to the punch bowl to get us both drinks.

Some time passed, but there were new faces to look at and dancing to look forward to and we did not much mark that Daniel had not yet returned. Then a new acquaintance Bess had made shortly after our arrival walked over toward us and said there was something of a brawl that had developed over and down toward the privvies.

We resolved to walk in that direction to see for ourselves.

I do not think I had ever truly seen a 'brawl' before. When we arrived (and they were within view of the privvies, but not near enough to them for the wind to be unpleasant) there was a great deal of shouting, and some of those involved clearly wanted to scuffle.

"No, Shhh," Bess said to me-even before I had said anything in response to what we had found. "What are they shouting about?"

Though perhaps not intentionally, the two sides were divided as one might be in a children's game, and each side appeared to have found its champion. On one side Daniel Scudder stood to the front of a group.

On the other, Samuel Tallmadge's older brother, Benjamin.

Words like King George and Liberty and Tory, sedition-were swirling about among rougher terms Mama probably would not have liked me to hear.

We had arrived only moments before others, also informed that unpleasantness was about to erupt down by the privvies.

It had to be broken up by several of the older men, who chalked it up to a bit too much punch (and whatever the younger men were passing around among themselves).

Once the two sides had more or less dissolved back into the growing crowd, Daniel Scudder managed to again find my side. His breath, indeed all of him, had become quite warm during his disagreement, and his breath showed more than a small taste of ale had passed over his tongue (though he never had brought me the drink he had gone to fetch). He was still angry, and distracted. Too much so to be particularly polite, much less pleasant.

I did not see where Bess had got to.

I kept my place by Daniel, all the way back to the dancing, because I didn't know what else to do. I wanted to have a good time, which seemed unlikely to come about on my own. I wanted to dance, which seemed somewhat likely if I were already coupled with a male partner. But Daniel's mind and dialogue were far from sociable.

He muttered more than addressed me, though he did seem to expect me to follow him. I reminded myself he had asked several dances of me.

He stopped near the edge of where the couples were forming up, as the dancing was about to begin. I assumed he was about to suggest he partner me, and though the current situation was hardly what I had imagined, I would have been a willing-enough partner.

And yet he did not.

I watched on as the dancing began, without me.

More than several measures into the first song, a shadow fell upon both of us when Benjamin Tallmadge stepped between the dancing (lit by lanterns) and Daniel Scudder and me.

It had been years (and important, growing-up years) since I had seen Benjamin Tallmadge, who had gone to Yale to study. When he left he would have been closer to Samuel in age. As we Outerbridges attended Reverned Tallmadge's church, and Setauket was not a large village, one could hardly keep from learning news and stories of Benjamin's time away. But those items were nothing, of course, to encountering the person himself.

He had been fifteen or sixteen when he left home. Making me but twelve, and making my relationship to him one chiefly of knowing that if Samuel misbehaved badly enough it was his brother Ben he'd answer to-before being taken to his father. As such, he had always seemed tall to me, imposing: this figure of discipline haunting his younger brother (to my girl's mind). But I could see now; he was tall in his own right, exceeding Daniel's height by almost a hand.

He wore his clothes well, but they were modest in their cut and color, the cuffs and buttons giving away their Connecticut provenance. A lock of his hair had fallen free from his queue (perhaps in the scuffle) and he had not managed to replace it back to where it might stay.

He looked only at Daniel.

"Daniel, I-" he began, and it looked to me of some reconciliation about to be spoken.

"I need hear no further words from you, Tallmadge," Daniel sneered at him, nothing of the gentleman about his manner. Nothing, even, of a nicely behaved boy. "And I-and my family'll not pay toward your schoolmaster's salary wherever you may seek it. One revolutionary pulpit hereabouts is all that shall be afforded your family."

Of course Daniel was in no position to speak for his entire family, being but nineteen and barely on his own. Benjamin tensed, his shoulders straightening, and his chin and head cocked to the side as Daniel spoke, his eyes attentive to, but not engaged by the words being said.

Daniel finished what he had to say, and though he had no tobacco in his mouth to necessitate it, spat off to the side, as if placing a period at the end of a sentence.

I wondered if I was about to be caught up in a second scuffle. For all that it seemed exciting-and certainly nothing like being back at home-it was not the style of excitement I had come here to seek out.

Ben Tallmadge held the gaze he had been giving Daniel through this, and let it linger a moment, almost as though he were making an unspoken answer to him within his own head. He turned his head, then, with a quite deliberate action, and looked directly at me. (Though he had paid me no notice yet at all) "Will you dance, Jenny?" he asked. His eyebrows bounced slightly, up from their usual resting place.

It was a rude question, of course, there could be no other thought about it. I was standing next to another young man. Benjamin Tallmadge could not have thought Daniel had not expected to engage me (or had not already) on the topic of dancing.

And he was no roughneck. No village fisherman without manners or polish. New Haven girls, girls who danced with Yalies, would require the utmost in refinement and gentility from their potential partners. Genteel introductions in lavish ballrooms, parental approval, dainty treatment, and gallant compeers.

 _But how could I pay too much mind to the strictures of etiquette when his hand was presented, lifted toward me, to take mine and lead me away from the disastrous evening anyone could see I was about to share standing beside Mr. Scudder?_

I don't think I even looked back to Daniel upon taking that hand, only foward to the lights and music ahead.

It was such a tentative grip, my hand in his as we walked away. Had either of us stepped apart even slightly, all contact would have been lost. Had I stumbled it would not have been close enough to help catch me. Had he relaxed his hand even a pin's width more, mine would have slipped from his grasp. For it to work, we had both to be equally committed to it. Willing.

I reminded myself to smile less broadly. To close my lips over my teeth and compose myself. His face was to the front, so he could not see mine presently, but I was not adept as a coquette might be at burying the glee that had overcome me upon getting free of the sour, unlikely to dance Daniel Scudder. However, I was feeling sheepish enough about my actions toward Daniel to keep quiet through our entering the forms and taking our places.

Once we were positioned for the Roger de Coverley, we faced one another.

There was a quick flick to the corner of his mouth which gave me pause to wonder if he were taking pleasure in having induced me to abandon his political rival, or simply in having persuaded me to behave rudely in order to gain a position among the dancers. And he had done it so easily.

"I trust your parents are in good health," he said, a perfectly acceptable opening for conversation between two people of acquaintance long ago, but not presently social.

"Yes, thank you," I told him, trying to find my way to the next thing to say. "I would ask after your father, but I have been in closer society than you to him of late. So perhaps I should answer, 'the Reverend is in excellent health'." I tried not to put an uncertain question mark at the end of my speech.

He smiled, though I could not tell if it were with me or at me.

"He has a hale constitution, that is a truth universally acknowledged."

"It must give you a degree of comfort, as you have been away," I replied, "knowing that he is so lusty." I stopped, rather wishing I had chosen a different adjective for the Reverend.

"I have been away," he agreed, looking at me, before turning his head of necessity in the dance. Again I could not tell if his breath had caught in the dance for a moment, or he was suppressing a laugh at my potentially unfortunate word choice. "Bess is looking well."

"Bess always looks well," I said.

"And she has found herself several beaux to pick from this evening," he added, a nod of his head in her direction where Bess had, indeed assembled a collection of potential partners. "One might think 'twill not be long before she leaves you and your parents at home."

"You have no trouble recognizing _her_ in a group," I said, without having the proper skill to sound casual about it.

A turn in the dance separated us.

His brows had drawn together in question when again we met up. "What?"

"You did not have to ask me who she was," I reminded him.

"Ah. Yes, well," he seemed relieved at understanding my comment. "Bess still looks very much of herself."

I looked at him, wanting to challenge with 'and I do not'? but even I knew my little-practiced verbal jousting with young men was too underdeveloped to successfully attempt that. But my intent must have shown up on my face.

He brought his head somewhat closer to mine. That uncooperative lock of hair again fell free of his queue. "It is well-known that Outerbridges are memorably pretty-looking girls."

"I don't think that is true at all," I said, and there was no artifice in my reply, nor its intent.

"You don't?" he said, with half-a-chuckle. He faced forward as we were now in a promenade.

"I think Bess is a great favorite of many people, and rightly so."

"And?"

"And to say anything else, to include me, is but an attempt at flattery. Why should you need to flatter me, Ben Tallmadge? I am already dancing with you." Had there been more to asking me for this dance than simply to take me away from Daniel Scudder?

He smiled, as if he had been caught out in some secret impropriety, but as though he did not mind. "Will you dance with me again?"

I turned to see his full face. It was growing later, the night now fully arrived. The lanterns cast shadows all about us, but the shadows upon his jaw were genuine: his beard was starting to show after this morning's shave. "Will you tell me about New Haven?"

His left hand went to try and slide back that lock of hair and get it to stay off his face. "Anything as is suitable for a young lady's ears."

The dancing became lively, and our words had to give way. I was flush with excitement. Being away from home I felt new somehow, just introduced to the world. I felt anything could happen. The sensation of giddiness from the turnings in the dance coupled with his gloveless hands on mine, the occasional brush or resting of his hands on my lower back, the pinch of ale that was on his breath but not overpowering. It all seemed of one pleasantly exotic treat. We danced three in a row.

We danced once more near the end of the night, after other dances I had accepted from other partners. After sweetmeats and punch. In the meanwhile Daniel Scudder had not left, nor had he taken any steps to grow more sober. He had not found me to claim the dances I had promised him. As we left what was to be our final dance, Daniel stalked over toward us, behind Benjamin's back.

"Ben!" I heard Samuel Tallmadge shout from wherever he was about, and Ben turned, able to block to blow Daniel had been intending for him.

Daniel was so drunken he could not stay upright, though Benjamin did not follow-up the attack with a fist of his own.

Ben took back my hand, his grip somewhat less relaxed than before, and walked me well-clear of Daniel.

"Do consider, Jenny," he said, throwing a glance over his shoulder, "if a man is so desperate to be ruled by an all-powerful and absent monarch, what sort of household might he wish to establish? What sort of husband will he expect to be? A ruler, obeyed at any cost? Or a benevolent leader, eager to listen to his wife and family?" He gave something of a shrug. His concern at the question appeared to be genuine.

I am certain we exchanged some form of non-committal farewells, though I do not recall them.

The evening was not yet concluded, though very nearly. He had danced with other partners (including Bess), had spent time among his circle of friends watching as well. A reverend's son, his education accomplished, his person unfettered by engagement of any kind, would never be unwelcome at such an event. And I had had the honor of walking through the figures with at least three other young men.

He had graduated Yale barely two months earlier, in '73. And he went on to become a schoolmaster. Until he walked (some said ran) away from that calling to join the Second Continental Light Dragoons.

To fight against kings and tyranny. To oppose the very injustice that is even now painted all over Setauket.

* * *

In the morning, the chair and Mama-and Cook's large knife-were no longer outside Bess' door.

When Sally B came to dress me, she said, "Mistress say you and her gonna visit Major Hewlett today. You gotta be lookin' your best."

"Will Papa come?" I asked, not certain what to think about this unusual announcement.

"Naw. Just the mistress and you."

I chose the green lawn.

 _ **...tbc...**_


	7. Pt II Epiphany: The War Drags On

**Day following the Feast of the Epiphany, January 1776**

It is silly, I do not disagree, to begin this entry upon the subject of cake. Cake, after I have been with mother to visit Major Edmund Hewlett at Whitehall. The most powerful man for miles, one of the grandest homes hereabouts. And yet what can I speak of, but tea cakes?

But what cake it was to be had! Light as cloud, and pale as downy white skin. The Judge's Aberdeen must have used three cups of sugar and no less than four eggs in the making of them. Baked so delicately they melted away in my mouth like savoring the best memory of happier times.

These tea cakes were not yesterday's leftovers, not excess from what had been made for celebrating the Feast of the Epiphany. No, they were freshly baked.

Small wonder, Mama said, that Major Hewlett chose Whitehall for his lodging, with sweets such as those on-hand. And a magician such as the Woodhull's Aberdeen to be at his disposal.

On the way home I suggested to Mama that perhaps Aberdeen were courting the Major to free her from Judge Woodhull the magistrate, as the Major had freed the Strong slaves through his order of an attainder placed upon their property.

"Hush!" said Mama sharply.

But of course Major Hewlett will not issue an attainder against Judge Woodhull. For what cause might he do so? They are peas in a pod, and it is clear would walk about from room to room arm-in-arm were the space to allow for it. (Whitehall is impressively spacious.)

The winter weather has been mild, going on a sennight. The lack of snow upon the ground allowed Mama to use our wagon for travel. She did not take Cleopas along to drive us, but took the reins herself-something I cannot recall her doing in recent memory. At the time I thought perhaps she felt him overtaxed in his duties, between waiting upon the lieutenants who make our home their billet, and my father's frequent indisposition.

I even thought at the time that perhaps she wished to make a point to my father (who did not travel with us) that she desired another servant, a young boy, perhaps, to effect such tasks for her, to add another elevation to whom we are become among the village.

Our ride there was largely silent, myriad questions washing over my mind, feelings of excitement at finally (for I had never been) being within Whitehall, wonder over what my mother thought to do once we were there. It was not the usual time for making calls. She had received no invitation from the Major to my knowledge (and I would know such a thing-it would be a matter of some Importance).

"Mind yourself, Jenny," she told me as we arrived and one of the soldiers standing guard took the reins to lead the horses and our wagon away. "This is not your father's dinnertable." Which I suppose was to mean I was to keep my opinion on blue coats to myself.

She did not acknowledge the laudable job I had done during the drive here of keeping my thoughts (some of them quite forceful) to myself. One must presume she did not mark it.

It was Judge Woodhull-in truth, Magistrate Richard Woodhull, but 'judge' he is often known as colloquially, although before the soldiers came 'Richard' was generally thought grand enough under most social circumstances-who interrupted the guard my mother was telling-for the second time-her name and that she wished to be shown in to see the Major. We were standing upon the small porch, and I-if not she-was growing dismayed that we were not instantly let in out of the cold.

"Claire!" Judge Woodhull exclaimed as he opened the door and recognized Mama. When his wife was alive, and Whitehall was no stranger to society and entertainments, Mama and Papa attended upon the Woodhulls often enough.

The Judge, with but a nod for me, held the guard at bay by assuring him we were wanted (though we were not invited) and ushered us into the entryway.

Were it not for other happenings of which I feel I must write, be assured I could devote several pages to the glory that is the Woodhull's Whitehall. (When I was a child, I thought their house simply named 'Woodhull' after the family.) It is rich in color and decoration, and yet not at all ostentatious. I do not know who was responsible for the arrangement of it, whether Mrs. Woodhull, or her husband. It may also be true that Abraham's wife (and Bess' acquaintance, Mary) may have left her mark upon it as well.

I think it must be the very epitome of taste and refinement, and it surpasses any splendor that might be found for miles.

It is said there is a hearth in every room, and though I did not have the honor of seeing every room to confirm this, the warmth upon entering from the cold out-of-doors could not be denied.

I studied everything, attempting to memorize each detail in order to recall it later, and perhaps at another time I shall write upon its glories further.

Although the household was clearly surprised at the appearance of Mrs. Outerbridge and her youngest daughter, there was nothing of kerfuffle to be seen or heard in their making ready to receive us.

Major Hewlett, we were told, was finishing breaking his fast, and would sit with us upon his completion. I know Mama well enough to feel her neck stiffen at the notion of a man only now eating his morning meal when we ladies had been up and about for several hours this day. Mama has never cared for men of leisure, no matter their station in life, and the idea that the man tasked with the welfare of all Setauket was so little needed in managing the village's affairs that he could indulge in a lie-in was, even to me, surprising.

Pleasantries were exchanged with Judge Woodhull, and for a few moments Mary Woodhull joined us.

"Have you seen the _Loch Lomond_ , Miss Outerbridge?" she asked me, and I let her know I had never before visited Whitehall.

"Now, I am certain that cannot be true-" the Judge began to protest.

"You are perhaps thinking of our Elisabeth," Mama interjected, smoothly suggesting that he had momentarily mistaken me for Bess in order to save him from the embarrassment of his error. (Though Bess is decidedly French in her looks, and I am fair of hair, as are Papa's people.)

The Judge wisely let the matter drop with a smile and a half-exhale. I do not know if he understood Mama's (far-fetched) deflection of his misplaced notion for the courtesy it was.

Mary Woodhull asked after Bess' health and said a few pleasant things about her company at the sewing circles she held at Whitehall, and encouraged me to remind someone that I should like to see the _Loch Lomond_ before we departed.

When the Major arrived, Mary Woodhull excused herself, perhaps understanding (even as I did not) that this was to be an interview of business with the Major. Judge Woodhull held his place, though I could not shake the feeling that Mama would rather he hadn't.

Major Edmund Hewlett, I found to be a gentlemen impeccably presented. He has a very pronounced jaw, but wears this feature in such a way one might call it elegant. His wig is fine and well-kept-truly no hair out of place. His uniform is not so very differentiated from those of the men who guard Whitehall (and it is, of course, a red coat), but it is beautifully tailored and kept in fine shape. His stockings showed no sag. His buckles and buttons, his gorget, seemed to shine and dazzle even when in shadow.

His mien is stiff, but this appears to be the acceptable standard for men of his military rank.

"Mrs-" it seemed the Major had abruptly misplaced Mama's surname.

Judge Woodhull spoke up. "Mrs. Claire Outerbridge, may I present Major Edmund Hewlett," he introduced them, "and her daughter, Jenny." (Correctly, he present me to the Major as opposed to the other way 'round. I am young and female and hold no particular standing here.) Then he went quickly on to aid the Major in making the connection. "You know Malachi Outerbridge down in the village..."

And so we were delicately and appropriately introduced. Not a pin out of place.

Mama, apparently feeling that her small talk had been accomplished with Judge Woodhull in the previous quarter hour, wasted no time into getting down to the business I had not apprehended we were here to address.

"You must forgive our uninvited intrusion, Major Hewlett," she began,

The Major attempted to wave it away, as though he was regularly pleased to find a duo of ladies interrupting his meals.

Judge Woodhull, probably never a man with a dearth of curiosity, leaned forward in his chair as if not to miss a thing.

Mama did not seem to mark it. "I think you will agree it would be unbecoming and unsuitable for my daughter and I to call upon you at your other-quarters," she said, giving our church now full of his horses a nicer name than it deserves.

"Yes, yes, of course," the Major replied, eager to agree.

How I am glad I was not made to again tread the floors of Reverend's Tallmadge church, now littered with straw and manure. And to attempt to bridle my comments therein.

"I am come to speak with you on Lieutenant Davis," her words were crisp and exact. It was immediately clear to me she had practiced what she meant to say, the impression she meant to make (perhaps even down to driving us here herself), "who late last night, in a display of drunkenness, made certain improprietous overtures to my daughter while she was unchaperoned in our home. I will be brief in my petition, and ask only how soon he might be removed from proximity to my daughter."

Major Hewlett looked as though my mother had withdrawn a fish from her reticule and slapped him upon the cheek with it.

Judge Woodhull began vigorously clearing his throat several times.

 _Can it be so unthinkable to them that a man could behave thus? Or can it only be that they were, rather, shocked at my mother for telling them of it?_

 _Did it seem unladylike to them? Petite, dark-haired Claire Outerbridge, her public deportment unmatched among (what amounts to) Setauket society, speaking against a soldier of no fortune or family who has forced his attentions upon her daughter. Did they find it immodest? Scandalous?_

If so, it is no small task for me to understand how my mother speaking candidly of what occurred last night ought bring with it for her any degree of shame, as she has behaved in ways nothing less than unassailably correct.

"Oh dear," Major Hewlett finally found his voice to exclaim, clearly showing his distress if not revealing its source (the actions of the Lieutenant or my mother's reporting of them). "You are not...injured, I trust?" he addressed me directly. Out of the corner of my eye I could see that Mama would have preferred his question to come to her.

Injured was the word he chose, but I knew the word behind it. _Had I been forced by the Lieutenant? Taken against my will?_ But no one would say a word such as rape, here.

"I am," I replied, choosing my words with care, knowing they were significant. "As well as ever I was yesterday morn."

Hewlett visibly sighed in relief, and looked to Judge Woodhull. "Richard, what are the-legal implications in such a matter, if any?"

Before giving any answer, the Judge looked to my mother. "Malachi is not coming?"

My mother shook her head.

"It would usually be the father to bring such a charge," he said.

Mama continued to address herself exclusively to the Major. "I have no desire to share this with my husband. I can think of no recourse he might wish to take, save challenging your soldier to a duel of some sort. And I think," she raised her brows to Major Hewlett, "we've neither of us a wish for that."

"No, no. Goodness no!" the Major agreed, but did not continue on speaking, and offered no immediate solution to the problem Mama had presented him. Rather, he sat and looked half-flummoxed (if sternly so).

"Our Elisabeth," I heard her say, "is soon enough to leave us for York City-"

"Ma-m-" I cut in, in surprise at this news, and at hearing it in this way, but Mama kept speaking, her voice rising slightly in volume to cover up my rude interruption.

"...which will give us more space. Her room will be vacant, and for the loss of Lieutenant Davis we may board two officers in his place, and yet keep on Lieutenant Williams."

"Two?" Major Hewlett responded with some surprise, but was clearly pleased. Only Strong Manor housed more British troops.

Mama smiled in a benevolent way she knew well to make use of. (She has used it to great effect with me often in the past.) "I shall trust you may know best which ones will comport themselves as gentlemen when around my daughter," she made it sound of a high compliment, "I cannot, and am confident your discernment in such matters is in harmony with mine, Major: I cannot have my daughters be treated as low women," she spoke as if she and the Major were natural allies, not one stroke to her speech as though they were on opposing sides of the problem at hand. "Drunken soldiers in a house with ladies is an invitation to disaster."

"Yes," he appeared genuinely aggrieved. "Yes, of course."

Throughout this Judge Woodhull looked dismayed, though blandly so.

Mama and the Major continued to discuss the means and manner of picking two-two!-new soldiers to add to our household, to eat our food and create extra work for our servants and crowd us out of our rooms, our pianoforte. (Outerbridges will soon be outnumbered in our own home), while I thought on Bess finally being granted her long-dreamed-for trip to York City, and on me learning of it in this roundabout way.

I felt exhausted between the night before and this very unexpected morning.

The Judge stood and asked if I should like to see the _Loch Lomond_ , it was in Major Hewlett's bedchamber, but he would be happy to accompany me upstairs while Mama and Major Hewlett completed their business.

I accepted without a second thought. Whatever I might have to say to Richard Woodhull could not be as treacherous as the task of minding my deportment around a British Major.

As for the _Loch Lomond_ , the Major's chamber is well-lit, and the painting (of which all Setauket at one time or another had heard) is beautiful to experience.

But Judge Woodhull, who may view it every day anytime (well, nearly anytime) he wishes, was not much interested in the art.

"You have grown, Jenny," he told me as I looked at the painting not being at all attentive to his desire to get me alone. "You are a young woman now, though I can recall you yet as a young little thing when Abraham attended the village school. Are you certain you did nothing-perhaps in ignorance-to convince Lieutenant Davis-?"

I turned and looked at him head-on, though it pained me to turn away from the bright canvas and instead see Richard Woodhull's often-sour face. I have no doubt that my face was transparent with disbelief at this turn of questioning. He went on.

"-That his attentions were wished-for?" He let a pause fall as I continued not to answer. " _Were_ his attentions wished-for?"

And here, Mama would have been proud of me. Nothing but vinegar leapt to my tongue for a reply, but I swallowed it down and found myself considering: _ought I burst into tears? Enact other hystronics to convince this man I had done nothing-nothing at all-save take breath and sit in my own home-and treat him civilly-to encourage Lieutenant Davis in his drunken state to accost me so?_

 _Should I deny the Judge's inference strenuously (as I immediately wished to do)?_

I did neither. I looked at him and thought of Mama, so cool, so collected as she had told (without ever saying she was telling him) Major Hewlett that Lieutenant Davis was to leave our home without condition and never return there, nor encounter me again during his time in Setauket.

And I spoke words whose genesis I could not even fathom came from within me.

"If by any gesture of civility and respect to the King's Men in Setauket I in any way caused Lieutenant Davis to believe I wished to be so entreated by him, you may know my regret is a profound one. Last night the lieutenant behaved in a way so outrageous and inappropriate I cannot think anyone witnessing it could ever take him for any kind of gentleman, much less a temperate man who ought to spend time among young ladies." And then I allowed myself to go a step further. "I have spent my life among the decent, good men of Setauket. There is no reason, nor desire within me, to cast my net for a soldier. Or throw away my life as a soldier's doxy." (That final word, while effective, was in retrospect possibly not something I ought to say in front of men like Richard Woodhull.)

Perhaps fortunately I heard someone at the door. So did the Judge. (And so I will never know what his response to my speech might have been.)

"Richard, I-I say, weren't you two coming up here to speak about the _Loch Lomond_?" Major Hewlett (who must have left my mother downstairs) asked. He must have overheard at least some of the nature of our discussion.

Then again, Whitehall may well be a place of many ears, now. All listening, looking for chinks in loyalty, secrets being told. For a moment I realized: life at Whitehall might be quite terrifying.

Judge Woodhull mumbled something (possibly he was appeased-at least he made no more enquires of me, nor suggested that Major Hewlett do so), and clasping his hands behind his back, left us alone together.

"Do you enjoy painting, Miss Outerbridge?" the Major asked me, after some time silently taking in the scene on canvas.

"I think it is likely that I would do so, Sir, yet Setauket has no painting master to employ for instruction," I informed him. "Mama painted as a girl. We have some of her works hanging at our home."

"Oh, yes!" he exclaimed quite suddenly, and with great enthusiasm, though he has never been to call at our house. "Williams mentioned them. Pastoral views-sheep, I seem to recall."

"Yes, that's...right," I replied, taken aback. The Lieutenant has discussed the paintings on our walls with his Major?

"Of course, we did not know their provenance-that they were the handiwork of your mother."

"She has not painted in many years."

"Hmm," he said, and then quickly turned the subject. "I wish you to know that Lieutenant Davis will be formally reprimanded-you needn't worry about the details. He will be placed in another billet, one without young ladies present. You and your family's name will be kept out of the business." An earnest crease divided his forehead. "It is my hope-and I daresay your mother's-that you may go forward as though this business never happened."

I don't know what pulled it out of me (I was not feeling at all beneficent), but I found myself wanting to speak for a moment to the lieutenant's state of mind. "He had just gotten a letter," I told the Major. "His fiancee in England, she has broken their engagement and he had overindulged in last's night's festivities, Major."

The Major tut-tutted. "You are very kind, and tenderhearted to speak so in his defense," (though I did not think it a defense, only an explanation. A man need not be flogged on my account), "but you must think no more on it. All been decided."

Before Mama and I departed, he spoke to me further only about the _Loch Lomond_.

* * *

Chill weather tends to discourage conversation, as it had on our trip to Whitehall, but on our way back to the village I could no longer keep my questions and impressions at bay, and chatted to Mama, happily at first, recalling the Major's keen eye for detail in the _Loch Lomond_ , his understanding of light and shadow, the story he shared of how he had once seen the Loch in person, himself.

And then I recalled Bess.

"Will Bess leave us?" I asked, hoping that the mention of her leaving for York City was somehow just another persuasive tool of Mama's to gather Major Hewlett's support for dismissing Lieutenant Davis from our home.

"Yes," was all she said, her breath cold and visible beside me.

"But the journey is perilous-and the city-is it safe? How _can_ she go?" I spoke not as someone jealous of a sister taking on an adventure without her, but as a concerned sister-which I was.

"Yes. Bess will go. Bess _must_ go. You are too young to recall,Jenny, but York City was never a safe place. If she minds herself, and keeps to your aunt's neighborhood, she will be fine. She will be fine." She said it a second time as though she were trying to assure herself.

But I heard none of this uncertainty at the time, only words telling me my sister was going far away from us.

I protested; Bess should stay here. We would miss her. And she, us.

"Bess cannot stay here," Mama spoke, an edge to her words. "She is soon twenty and two. What is there for her in Setauket? She must marry and begin a life."

"But-"

"Would you see her wed to a King's Man? Wife to an officer who could be killed, and if not killed, would someday very likely take her back to England? Take her back to the places we left to come here? Who is there left for her to marry at her level or above it in Setauket?" Her manner was half disappointed, half irritation. "The war has taken our young men for both sides, it has disrupted our craftsmen from taking on apprentices. Look around, Jenny. We are a village of old men, married farmers, and boys. Our Bess was not meant for a soldier."

Her words went deep into me. I had never thought of my parents fearing the loss of one (or all) of us back to England, or France, even. Never thought that the journey they had taken to arrive here (first in York City and then Setauket) were steps they had no wish to see re-traced. It is true there is little courting to be done in Setauket. I have so said before. Eligible men of respectable trade and family are few if any. Families such as the Woodhulls have looked far afield for wives, as with Mary Woodhull, first meant for Thomas, and then taken by Abraham. As always, some go for whalers, away for long years trying to make their fortune. The Tallmadge sons have gone for rebel soldiers.

 _Soldiers_.

"Is that why we called on Major Hewlett today?" I asked, trying to keep a tremble from my voice at this declaration. "Because the Misses Outerbridge are not meant for soldiers' wives?"

'Not meant for a soldier'. The words seemed to echo in the air about me. And though I was chilled, chilled me more deeply. _Not all soldiers are in the King's Army, Mama_ , I wanted to say.

I did not speak it.

"Do you imagine Bess wants a soldier for a husband? I should hope not," Mama chid me. "And yet I sit here and listen to you carry on about your meeting with this illustrious Major Hewlett as though you have forgotten who he is-what he has done to us. You think him discerning, you think him a fine conversationalist. You declare you find him refined, civilized. Well-spoken. He discoursed eloquently with you about a painting hanging in the room he has claimed for himself at Whitehall." She threw my shared impressions back at me. "A painting that belongs to Richard Woodhull. A _house_ that is also property of Richard Woodhull. Hewlett is a soldier. You are more foolhardy than I fear if you think he has no blood on his hands, no greater sin of violence on his conscience, than flogging Lieutenant Davis for his behavior toward you."

I am not accustomed to Mama speaking so. It was silence between us from that moment on, though we were not far from the village outskirts when she spoke it, and though it would be unlikely for us to be heard over the wagon's creaking, we dared not risk speaking so forthrightly on such a subject.

 _Did I let Edmund Hewlett and his well-bred demeanor turn my head? Did I forget for a moment who was speaking to me?_

Perhaps. Perhaps I did. In that well-appointed room, richly furnished, cozily warm, the war and the gravestones and the church's desecration, the fate of good men like Selah Strong became distant. And standing there beside him I was able to recall-for a moment, a small, pristine moment-that afternoon you told me about your tutor's father's house in New Haven. The painting of that boy's sister that hung in their drawing room. The way you described how perfectly the fabric of her gown was rendered in the paint. The flick of a smile at the corner of her mouth, as perfectly captured as you had once seen it when dancing with her.

Perhaps I should have had the presence of mind to feel jealousy that you could so ruminate on the portrait of another woman. But I did not. I only drunk it in, imagining vividly what I would never see-much less see at your side. The lilt of your hands, their long fingers lithely detailing the color of the landscape hanging in that distant home's dining room. Had your face been beatific, or have I overwritten onto it the expression of the cherubs you described adorning yet another canvas?

Perhaps I am foolhardy. I know Edmund Hewlett to be a man whose actions-whose alliances-I cannot endorse-no matter the kind gentility of his manner. But I cannot agree to entertain the notion that a man who might speak so movingly, who might be so touched by the artistry of a painter, has been turned by acts of war into an unsalvageable beast unfit for love or marriage.

I dream some nights of those paintings hanging in that house in New Haven. Those paintings that I have never seen. That house I shall never enter. They are no doubt more glorious, more transporting in my mind's-eye than they ever could be in-person. I pray that you dream of them, too. I pray that some of their beauty, some of what so touched you about them, finds purchase in your memory and nests in your soul beside the memorized Scripture of your father.

Bess will leave us. I shall room in with Sally B. The war drags on, and Washington is said to be finished. Two officers more shall now be billeted here.

But Outerbridges are not meant for soldiers. I shall need such memories of you, myself, to continue to endure.


	8. Episode: Mr Culpeper 'Detour' Pt I

I stop now in my self-appointed catalogue task.

Following our visit to Whitehall, it came to me that I was then in a most peculiar position to notate certain things about the house, its arrangement, rooms, servants and lodgers. As may be seen among prior pages, I have endeavored to do so, rather exhaustively.

It is the headquarters of the King's army here in Setauket (for all that Reverend Tallmadge's church on the hill is so during daylight hours). Yet there would be little sense in attempting to attack the church (at the very least it would make little sense to me, though I've only an anemic knowledge of battle strategy), which is alone and highly visible, with an unobstructed view nearly down to the water's edge. There is but a meagre stand of trees off to the side within which to seek cover. The parade ground near the church is overrun most hours with all manner of soldiery.

Whitehall, however, whilst guarded by two men at all hours-and housing other soldiers within it-is the lodging of the most powerful military man hereabouts, Major Edmund Hewlett. It is away from the village, and it is fortuitously (for any raiding party) nearby thick woods.

Such information about its contents and in-doors arrangement may surely prove helpful at some future date. This diary has also been put to use keeping daily track of the actions and orders of soldiers in Setauket, their numbers and their dispositions as can be surmised by one such as I.

To what end, cannot presently be known.

And yet now I must detour from that task and detail something far more personal.

It has been six weeks since Mama and I called upon Major Hewlett at Whitehall, at which time I learned very publicly that our Bess was to leave us for York City and a chance at a broader acquaintance. (And a removal from such an intimate company of soldiers as a single young lady in hopes of making a match finds here in Setauket.)

I have endeavored to keep the majority of my disappointment upon this happening as much to myself as possible, and to share only in the excitement and planning Bess has had before her.

This resolution of mine has worked better for me in some situations than others. Particularly with the fact that Bess and I have been sharing a bedroom since the altercation with Lieutenant Davis, and privacy has been in short enough supply to enable me to write herein, much less to overly dwell upon my feelings at her impending journey.

She and Papa, with Cleopas, are to depart tomorrow, early, in the hopes of traveling a goodly distance before they must stop for nightfall. Papa is not pleased to be needing Cleopas, as he is our only manservant, and his absence leaves Mama and I alone in the house with only Sally B., our cook and kitchen girl to manage the soldiers now lodging here.

(This notion frets Papa, though I do not believe Mama has yet shared with him the inciting factor in Lieutenant Davis' removal from our home.)

The second of Major Hewlett's promised two (in exchange for the dismissal of one which Mama negotiated) will arrive before tea time the same day to take his place in Bess's room-the bed likely not even turned fully cold from where she and I will have shared it for the last time.

I say last time, and admit-though only within these pages-that it has not slipped my mind that with another Lieutenant here, and me now sleeping-in with Sally B., that if Bess were to return home, there will be no little question as to where she might sleep. Though Mama would not concur that she has noticed, Papa looks at Bess as one might look at someone from whom they are about to make a long-lasting farewell.

I do not forsee Bess back at home in Setauket.

Nor do I feel we Outerbridges are likely to all of us journey to York City until such a time as the war has ended, should we live to see that day come to pass.

* * *

The house has been, for all Mama's skill at management, thrown quite off-kilter with Bess' departure. We have sent off family members before. Michael and James had each left us (and Setauket) when they grew of an age to make their own ways in the world, and Papa was in need of widening the reach of his business. Papa's apprentice Simon had lodged here, before returning to York City and the home of Papa's oldest friends (and business associates) the Fisks, who will soon be entertaining and lodging Bess.

We are perhaps sorrier to lose Bess (though I was quite young when Michael and James left us for New Rochelle and Norwalk, respectively, and my recall of those years can be incomplete), and we have had less preparation than we might. And it is also quite likely that Bess, in her eagerness, is enjoying the bustle and topsy-turvy created by her plans.

Chests were opened, dresses gone over with a fine eye to any misplaced detail that must be mended and set right, or the gown discarded and not packed. Conversation must be had throughout such tasks going over again and again the route best to be taken there, the street names she must learn, the arrangement of the Fisk's house. The birth order and nicknames of their children, their children's spouses.

Mama has been, in addition to all else, attempting to bring about a final finishing of Bess' education, particularly in her social deportment.

Setauket days are full enough with running the house, seeing to family mending, the few social calls we may expect. We none of us Outerbridges have ever been solely at our leisure, no matter what the village may think. It has now become quite a challenge to find both time enough and privacy for this diary, and I snatch at either whenever slightest promise of them appears.

Today for reasons unknown (and which I had no desire to discover), Sally B. and Cook had both been tasked with going into the root cellar on some errand of Bess'. The snow has lessened in the last week, and is mostly gone from the ground ('til a new fall), but the cold has not. And no matter the relative warmth and windbreak our root cellar, I'd much rather be here with pen.

* * *

Bess has found me, not half-hour gone, and she entered our (now-shared) bed chamber laughing. It was a laugh of enjoyment, without malice or edge. She was happy: everything now pleased her that it wore the promise of York City.

"Jenny!" she sang my name as she had when we were children. "See what I have found!" she declared, holding up a sealed packet of paper above her head, as though I might try to snatch it from her grasp and she, with the advantage of height, might pull it away.

The very kind of game an older sister might practice upon a younger.

"What is it?" I asked, attempting to show a decided lack of curiosity and wealth of world-weariness, knowing such a game can only intensify if the younger sister appears to want that which the elder possesses.

She smiled. "Oh, it's too silly," she laughed again. "I don't even know what it is-only that I have found it among my things as Sally B. and I are packing. But it bears your name!"

"My name?" I asked, throwing off all pretence of disinterest. Packets of sealed paper that bear the name of Jenny Outerbridge are few and far between.

Some activity out of the window must have captured her attention, she walked straight toward the pane glass, and her hand, like an afterthought, trailed behind her, allowing me to grab hold of the packet.

"I was cross with you when it arrived. I cannot recall why," her voice had lost its boisterous edge in her distraction. "I had forgotten all about it."

"When?" I asked, almost too afraid to stare down at the writing it bore. "When did it come?"

"Oh, forever ago," she said, still straining to see something out-of-doors, likely between the docks and the Strong's Tavern (where most of the bustle in the village occurs). "I could not possibly recall when." And then she turned. "After all, Goose, I can't remember why I was so angry with you that I would hide it and not tell you about it in the first place!" She chuckled as though I were being just the ridiculous gooseberry she had called me out as and, her mind clearly already on to what task of preparation was required next, floated out of the bed chamber, each step taking her farther away from me, from her family, from all of life she had known.

I looked down, no time for the moment to reflect further upon Bess' coming journey and change of station. The packet sat, rough and yet still-crisp in my hand. The side addressed to me (I still had not seen it) faced my palm. The seal was up, my thumb ran over it, as it might over a particular collection of stitches in a needlepoint for comfort, for orientation.

I dared to turn it over. It could not be very old, I told myself: the paper was in too good a condition. It could not be. It could not be. It was nothing.

It was, perhaps, part of a greater joke of Bess' (though it was clear Bess had things well beyond laughing at me on her mind at present).

My thumb flipped the unbroken seal back to my palm.

"Miss Jenny Outerbridge" the script read, clear and unsmudged.

It was written in the practiced hand of a schoolmaster.


	9. Mr Culpepper Pt II-Words from the Past

Something stopped for a moment, I felt, in my bosom, and then proceeded to return-this beat of my heart-far stronger than it had been before.

I clutched the packet still in my hand, though with enough foresight not to crease it. I knew the handwriting upon it. Or, rather, I reminded myself I _felt_ I knew it. Time changes memory, particularly when memory is not strong and vivid to begin with. I own nothing else in this hand, possess no other sampling of it. Why should it so call to me of familiarity?

And now, even in my distraction, activity out our upper-storey window caught my attention. Below, Abraham Woodhull had made a stop at Strong Tavern, his cart filled with hogs, facing the opposite direction of Whitehall.

It appeared he was setting out today for York City, where Papa has mentioned Judge Woodhull has contracted to sell off his hogs to the British Army.

Yet another person leaving Setauket for the world beyond us. For adventure and fate-chasing, and-and- But of course Abraham will be coming back. To his wife Mary, his son Thomas, his farmhouse.

He has strong ties, here. His place is here and he accepts that, takes comfort, perhaps, in that. He will travel to York City, but he is destined to return. No one will occupy his bed in his absence. Those who might miss him will be comforted by his homecoming; to village, to farm, to family and home.

The room in which I stood was by afternoon next to be assigned to a new officer. Recalling this I walked to latch the door, hoping to make the most of the last few minutes of privacy the space might afford me.

I broke the sealing wax, wondering at Bess' temperament. She had been cross enough with me to abscond with this item, and yet not hot enough to spy upon its contents? Sisters can be confounding girls. I squeezed my eyes shut as I broke its seal, as if a terrible goblin might pop out from between the sheets of paper.

The outer parchment had been used solely for packaging, an extravagance I had not witnessed since the earliest days of the King's Men arriving here in force.

Inside was not merely a note, but a letter.

The salutation was addressed to me, albeit quite plain and formally as, 'Miss Outerbridge'.

Because I mean to keep careful watch over the letter, I will not place it within this diary, but transcribe its contents here, in full:  
" _Miss Outerbridge,_

 _I bid you good day, and entreat your utmost patience in reading to the end what I have set to paper, here._

 _I have tasked our Bartimaeus with delivery of this to your home once I am gone from Setauket, and most likely departed from Long Island and its environs. I have given also into his keeping a letter for my father, and Samuel. Bartimaeus is as trustworthy a man as I have ever known, and so I harbor no doubt that it will find its way safely into your hands._

 _I would not have made so secret my leaving had I not been well-aware of my father's hopes to keep Samuel, at his younger age, well out of harm's way. I know he greatly fears that my going to join with the cause for Liberty will inspire Samuel to do the same. And so secrecy seemed the best course._

 _My classmates as have gone to join up have had the luxury of their families hosting receptions and teas in their honor. Setauket, swung toward the Loyalists as it presently is, offers no such safety in opportunities for formal leave-taking._

 _However, as I made my final, private plans to bid Setauket farewell for the present time, I found I could not leave happily without writing to you (as there has been no time in the interim to share my thoughts with you in person) of your performance of Mr. Boccherini's_ Minuets _last Thursday even in the home of the Smiths._

 _It was as fine a rendition of them as I have ever heard, and you triumphed over the poor quality of light their tapers gave out, seeming to know the sheet music well-to-heart. I can scarce recall a livelier, more jolly and bright interpretation of them._

 _Please know that I shall hold that night in my memory as the last, truest and most homelike of all recent social gatherings in our village._

 _As such, I must ask that you accept my apology that I am unable to render these addresses_ in propria persona _._

 _It has long been my intent, rather I have long known, that the day of my departure was coming. Perhaps even before I left for New Haven and pursued my formal education. And yet I waited, even as my friends joined up. Waited, wanting assurance that my own ideals had not been swayed-nor immaturely formed-only by charismatic men capable of eloquent speech and persuasive writings._

 _I am certain now, and certain that the time has come. I shall take my wages from my work here on Long Island and travel to purchase my own commission. I do this knowing, sadly, that the actions my conscience requires of me may place those for whom I care-even those with whom I've merely socialized-in precarious positions with their neighbors and the King's government in my absence._

 _But I hope my leaving will not be seen as a failure in loyalty-to this country at large, nor to the village._

 _For years I have been in the employ of Long Islanders. And as I have, in the position of school master, tried to advance and defend the people of these parts, so I shall endeavor to continue to do in the Continental Army, to work toward the betterment and liberty of all._

 _Now, having made you aware of the admiration in which I held-and shall continue to hold-your recent playing at the Smiths, I must close, and settle my final arrangements._

 _I remain, yours sincerely,_  
 _Benjamin Tallmadge_ "

* * *

I had barely completed reading before Bess threw the latch off the door and re-entered, drawn again to the window, but (one assumes) seeing Abraham Woodhull no longer there, lost interest in the view, and turned toward me.

"I remember!" she said, pleased with herself. "It was the Tallmadge's man! Standing there at the door as dour and ancient as could be. What did you miss out on? A walk with Samuel? Cards of an evening?" she asked. "Oh, I hope it was something delicious. If not, my revenge will have been hollow." She chattered on as though we were still at playing a child's game.

And yet nothing within me felt of a child, save a flash of desire to find the good shears and snip at least one of her sidecurls before she snatched them away from me.

I left her company immediately and sought out Sally B.'s room (soon, also, to be mine), small and low-ceilinged, but empty, as Sally B. and Cook were still at Bess' disposal.

I report here that I have been crying, though I cannot make out if my tears are for the girl I am today, or the girl I was when you left here without a word to anyone; gone with no fanfare, no farewell to give or accept.

That girl I was has been hurt, and confused for such a long time. But perhaps Fate's hand in the matter was sure. Had Bess not hidden away your letter, Ben Tallmadge, what would there have been to stop me, like Samuel, from running after you?

Becoming yet another in the list of villagers vacating Setauket, going out to meet with the world.


	10. Mr Culpepper Pt III - Bess' eau-de-nil

In light of my earlier writing, I found myself most curious to recall with greater accuracy the night Benjamin Tallmadge referenced in his farewell letter. And so I have paged through what of such accounts I used to keep (spotty and poorly scriven), and found my entry upon that very night, and shall transcribe it (hopefully in a far-better hand) here.

"Yesternight we were twelve for dinner at the Smiths. There is little enough alteration to remark upon about their home since last I visited there. The Smith boys are too young yet for society, and so we saw (and surprisingly, heard) nothing of them. But all the village knows Mrs. Smith considers herself (or perhaps one should say 'aspires to have herself considered') a great matchmaker, and so she rarely holds such dinners without inviting an equal portion of young, unattached villagers along with established married couples.

Presumably, we are the evening's entertainment.

Which I should not disparage. The food is always generous in portion and attractive in presentation, and they are one of the few homes in Setauket to boast their own spinet, and though their parlor is too small for even rudimentary dancing, one cannot ignore the polish music lends to such an occasion.

Bess and I were invited, and walked the distance to the Smith home without complaint, our nicer shoes in our hands, hidden by our cloaks. How she managed to espy her eau-de-nil hair ribbon upon my wrist, where I had borrowed it for the evening, I do not know. Her eyes ought have been to the ground, minding the hem of her skirts.

She was angry with me, but thankfully I did not have to listen to her protests long, as we arrived at the Smith's door and were ushered in.

The dinner was served late, whose centerpiece was a hearty mutton, admirably cooked. I overheard several of the men comment positively upon the reliable wine that was paired with it. As I have referenced prior, we were three established, married couples and six unmarried, young people, two of whom were Bess and I.

To keep the numbers even, Bess and I were joined by Rachel Clark, and the young men were the Tallmadges and Jem Crofton. Were any potential pairings of Mrs. Smith's to work out by age, that would have put Samuel and I, Bess and Mr. Crofton, and Ben Tallmadge and Rachel Clark together as couples.

I do not mind, and have generally never minded Samuel's company-at least not since he stopped pulling my hair when we were in school. But I find myself less satisfied of late with other's expectations of me. Why must Samuel be designated mine, and I, his-for no other reason than our similarity in age? Why must Rachel Clark be seated by Benjamin Tallmadge when Bess is far-better acquainted with him than Jem Crofton-who is the younger brother of Rachel's closest friend?

Can we not, even at dinner, be free of Mrs. Smith's machinations? Can we not be trusted to find our own way?

Thankfully, conversation remained largely communal, no doubt thanks to Ben and Sam speaking cross-table on current events (or what we here know of current events), and curious to hear everyone's opinions-even those of the ladies.

"And you, Miss Jenny," Benjamin asked directly of me (though from prior, less public conversations we've had I can think him in no true doubt about my thoughts on such matters as the Patriot Cause), "what say you?"

But then I thought of Papa and Mama, who were not present, but who had made it quite clear Outerbridges were not to voice opinions for or against any such cause. Ours was not a social life of speeches and possible affronts to host and hostess. I looked at the other guests, uncertain of many of their political leanings, and I paused.

Even as Ben Tallmadge looked at me, his eyebrow cocked as it did when he was curious about the answer to any question. Was it a challenge he issued to me, here? To say aloud and in public notions I had shared with him one-on-one?

"Jenny?" I heard Bess' voice, playing at incredulous, cut in from where she was seated, partnered to Jem Crofton. "Knowing her mind's simple as knowing she thinks that ribbon 'pon her wrist is pretty. She has no thoughts for tariffs or the money-changing that went into bringing it to her."

My mouth remained open from where I would speak before, my eyes falling down to the eau-de-nil upon my wrist before I recalled: 'twas hers. I had nipped it from her small chest of such things and placed it on myself in hopes of covering a scratch I'd gotten that did not become a young lady attending a fine dinner with gentlemen guests. The additional fact that it set the curve of my wrist off to great effect was not lost upon me.

I looked up only to see that Benjamin Tallmadge's eyes had also been upon my wrist and the ribbon there. When our eyes met, he looked tentative, a man thinking to see a fight, not certain one was about to erupt.

Instead of hot words from my lips, I sucked in breath through my nose (hopefully none too loudly, nor indelicately).

"Shall we have music tonight, Mrs. Smith?" I heard from my side, Samuel interposing himself into any manner of complications in hopes of resurrecting the peace. I turned to smile my thanks at him, without even caring that Mrs. Smith (whose eyes I'm sure were upon us) would take such a gesture and draw her own, highly romantic conclusions.

Music we did have, the married women giving way to the younger, and even Rachel Clark (who thinks herself something of a village prodigy when it comes to music) appeared to enjoy herself when Bess and I took our turns.

The eau-de-nil ribbon of Bess' must have come loose as I stood to walk toward the instrument. I did not notice its absence as I played, nor did my wrist's scratch catch my eye. I noticed little else than the music, into which I poured my enjoyment of the evening, the company to be had, the satisfaction in being able to find amenable society here among our village.

When I returned to where I had been sitting, rather than finding the ribbon upon the cushion of the seat, it was in the fingers of Benjamin Tallmadge, standing (as were the other men) until I re-seated myself. He and Rachel Clark were immediately behind the seats that Samuel and I had taken. Rachel was momentarily distracted by something Jem was saying to Bess.

I watched Benjamin thread the ribbon over his knuckles once, twice before his eyes came up (he behaved for that instant as though he had been in the room utterly alone) and he realized I had returned.

"You've dropped this," he said, and slowly extended it toward me.

I told him it was Bess', that I had taken it for the night and she was now cross with me.

"Bess'?" he asked, seeming surprised, though gently so. "Well, I would not have you lose it, then," he said.

The others played, the lamps grew dimmer, and as always we knew it was time to make our farewells. The Tallmadges, leading their horses, walked us home. Bess did not speak to me, so I must assume her quarrel with me endures."

So ends my account of that night.

We four made our farewells, none of which I can recall, nor marked at the time as out-of-the-ordinary.

And yet in the days and weeks to come, how I scoured that account looking for something, hoping to find something, often believing that I *had* found something, some preferential treatment or interaction from you.

You were ever a discreet young man, ever true and steady, and it would be beyond imagination to expect you to place word or deed deliberately in such a way as to tempt a girl into belief when there was no hope for such.

This letter from you I have only now, after much time passed, received, it has made me a truer believer than before. It has affrighted me more than before.

For what I stand to lose now is not (or at least was not) merely a pipe-dream. Not some fantastical day-dream without substance, without future.

You wrote three letters. That is all the leave you allowed yourself to take in the world entire.


	11. Mr Culpepper Pt IV - Gone

We have been assigned a Corporal Eastin to take his place in Bess' former bedchamber.

He comes with several references. Absurd; as though we had the wherewithal to refuse him. He came also with a paper announcing that he is regularly assigned to guard Whitehall, and frequently at night, and so during daylight hours the noise about his bedchamber is to be modulated accordingly.

Mama and I learned this but-shortly after bidding Bess, Papa and Cleopas farewell. The morning was chill. Even the horses liked it little enough. We parted by lantern, as the Spring has not yet welcomed the sun any sooner of a morning.

I hugged Bess, and hoped to present a brave face, so she need not remember me always as blurry and wrinkled with weeping. She had been jolly enough all morning. It was to be the first step of her new life, the excitement of York City, the adventure of travel upon the Coast Road between here and there.

Papa is to spend a fortnight with her at the Fisk's.

They are two brothers sharing one residence; the elder a bachelor of such an age no one expects he shall ever wed, who is teased about his old maid-ish ways. The younger Fisk, barely older than Papa, a married man with children (mostly grown and married as well). His youngest child with his third wife (God rest the souls of his prior brides) it is said happily runs rough-shod over their home, to his parents' delight. Mrs. Fisk is but some five years older than Bess, and with her stepsons and stepdaughers married and about in York City society, Bess' connections will in the instant of her arrival into their home be exponentially enlarged.

The Fisks no doubt continued to loom large in Bess' imagination even as she said goodbye to Mama and Setauket and I. Before she told me farewell, she hugged me close, and I hugged her back.

"Forgive me, Jenny," she said, so that only I could hear her. "And do not think badly of me when I am gone. I should not have stolen your letter."

It startled me to hear her call back to that item. She had seemed so distracted by other things I did not expect her to ever mention it, much less think of it, again. She pulled away from me, and must have seen my face (whose expression I cannot reliably report upon here).

"Goose," she asked (though perhaps she had not intended to pry further), and her brow furrowed deep. "What was it to? Who was it from?"

Rumors (or truths) had been snaking their way about town these last months that Samuel Tallmadge is captured and imprisoned on the prison ship Jersey. Bess already knew Bartimaeus, the Tallmadge's man had delivered the letter (if she cared but to again recall it). It would have taken nothing to tell her it was from Samuel, and she would have felt the ache of her conscience, then. Could have gone toward York City chewing over whether she had robbed me of some meeting or tryst with him.

But something in me decided to tell truth in that moment. "Ben," I said, aloud, "Benjamin Tallmadge." To me it felt like words not meant for such a cold morning and a chilly reception. To me it felt clandestine, confessional.

And instead of the reaction I had expected of her (that she would be appeased, but hardly see anything more in that answer)-a quite different reaction, more intense, more concerned, quite possibly, than had I listed the presently in-peril Samuel as its author.

"God forgive me," she said, "for being so petty. Jenny," she grabbed me back hard into her arms, "you're my best friend." And I felt the warmth of her face, and the wet of her tears.

But I didn't want her embrace to last a moment longer. I had been lying awake all night, unable to think straight between her leaving and Benjamin's letter arriving, finally, in my hands.

I wished to reply to him. To get word to him. To find a way to respond (no matter the distance of time) to what he had left behind for me. And yet I could not find my way around the danger of entrusting Bess on her journey with a letter addressed to a Captain in the Continental Dragoons. Not to mention the difficulty she might find in attempting to send it on its way, nor the fact that I should have to confess a certain number of things my heart has kept from her.

And yet, here I had. And she had understood. Understood well enough to be truly shamed for what she had done. And I realized all I had to do was pen a letter without salutation or specifics to Ben. Give it to Bess to address at such a time as she felt it was safe, and had located a reliable, discreet courier.

That this had only come to me now was outrageous. I could not get free of her arms. And the moment I did she would say farewell to mother, and the horses would be told to walk on and there would be no time, no time at all to cut a pen, to write that letter, to beg her to find a way to deliver it as penance for her actions against me, against my happiness.

I embraced her back. "Write me," I asked. It was all I could think of to say.

Mama and she took their turn, then.

As we walked back into the house, our wagon all but out of sight, the sky coloring up for the sunrise, Mama walked more quickly toward the door, and stepped to the side. In surprise I watched as she retched to the left of the stone step.

Her sickness passed in a few moments. She tells me she is, by her count, three months' gone, but she will wait to tell Papa when he returns in a fortnight.

* * *

It is after our noon meal. Mama and I ate, as we must, with the officers (now three). Corporal Eastin, it would seem, is not so keen on sleeping as he would miss a plateful of Cook's luncheon.

The officers have informed us that Abraham Woodhull, just recently departed for York City (not two days ago) was set upon whilst on the Coast Road, after Northport, robbed and beaten and left to die by some sort of scavenging Continental (so they are saying).

At this news, Mama's face turned ashen and she excused herself from the table.

I did not follow, but allowed for her dignity.

Lieutenant Williams expressed concern over her departure, which was gentlemanly, if unnecessary. He informed Corporal Eastin that those presently absent from our family had set out on the same road for York City just this morning. I saw Eastin incline his head as though this was sad news, but cannot shake the impression that something about such a bleak prospect appealed to him in some way, the way of those cruel individuals who rejoice in the news of another's suffering.

I am of half a mind to order Sally B. to remove the bulk of the feathers in his mattress one day when he is away on duty. But Mama would not permit such behavior, I know.

Mama and I may not agree on much, but neither of us will truly rest, I think, until we hear Papa and Bess have safely arrived in the arms of the Fisks.

And when that news might come, none can say.


	12. Mercy Moment Murder Measure - MERCY

**Mercy:**

Mornings are not what they once were, now that I find myself abed with our Sally B.

Needs must that she rise earlier than the rest of us, and it will come as no surprise that with her absence, also departs her body's warmth. Yet even so, with long nights of darkness in which I lie awake contemplating whether Papa and Bess (and Cleopas) are safe from harm, arrived (or not) to York City, so weary am I become the closer to the dawn, I have hardly noticed the cold 'til at least a quarter if not an half-hour gone.

This morning it seemed to me she rose earlier than usual, even with the new demands the addition of Corporal Eastin to our household brings with it. When I readied myself (as I must now do, Cleopas gone and Cook, Sally B. and the kitchen girl accomplishing their own work as well as taking on his) and made my way to the kitchen to find her, she was already washing up a plate. Before any of us had broken our fasts.

When I asked what she was doing (with the plate), she said she had been feeding a stray dog out by our empty boathouse.

As this diary shows in previous pages, there is a very particular breed of dog known to frequent our boathouse of late. A dog who once told me Sally B. took care of him.

I gave her what I hoped was a soul-piercing look. "And did this dog have anything of import to say?" I asked.

I can barely relate the look she gave me in return. "Dogs don't talk, Miss Jenny," she told me, adding slowly, "You know that." Just as though I were grown soft in my intellect.

I gave a huff meant to show my dissatisfaction with her and her unvoiced suggestion about my wits, and walked out to the privy, detouring to the boathouse on my way. It was as it has more or less always been since the King's Men came to town. The only thing I could even come close to telling myself MIGHT have been out-of-place was the small patch of oil cloth in the upper cabinet where I once stowed this very diary for the sake of secrecy.

Perhaps, perhaps someone (out of boredom, out of curiosity or pure hope of deviling me) had been rooting around up there, hoping to still find it within.

* * *

It was no doubt that very possibility (that Caleb Brewster had again come to Setauket) that caused me to ask permission of Mama to pay a call on Carrie Brewster, living out from the village, beyond Hayman's farm, on her uncle Lucas Brewster's orchard.

"It is too early, yet," Mama had replied, referencing the season for growing to not yet have begun. "And yet, with Bess-" she did not finish with what she might think Bess' fate was, "I should not be surprised you are wanting for the conversation of a young woman your own age."

I do not know what Mama might think my relationship with Carrie Brewster might be, but intimates it certainly is not (nor never has been). We were long ago schoolmates, before either of us learnt to spell or scribe, before her family withdrew her from the school, an environment within which she never grew comfortable, her palsy becoming more accentuated with age, and her naturally backward disposition anathema to wider society of any kind.

Even so, I had made a promise to carry news of her brother when time (and good sense) allowed. Caleb's visit in which I encountered him, and which resulted in the desecration of the stones from our churchyard, was distant enough that I thought I might attempt a call to share what news-what very very slender news-I could share with her of her brother.

* * *

As I stood, preparing to sit in the very modestly appointed and sized Brewster drawing room, I recalled that if Caleb had been Carrie Brewster's staunchest defender, then Benjamin Tallmadge would have been her knight-errant, performing any number of kindnesses towards her, acquiring things which would please her. Bringing what there was of the larger world with him here, placing it without threat or menace within reach of in her timid grasp.

There had been talk (what little talk of Carrie Brewster that there ever might have been amongst Setauketers) that it was Benjamin who sporadically tutored her once she left school, and that he maintained a correspondence with her during his scholar's sojourn in New Haven.

She was such a little thing. (I had known this, of course. She was no stranger to me-though a distant acquaintance at best.) I had forgotten her delicacy. Carrie was petite in stature, as becomes a lady, and her features were childlike-but without being babyish. And yet her hands and style of dress were hardy (as becomes an orchardist's niece). It is possible in her adulthood she bore a strong resemblance to her brother, though it would be hard to judge such a thing through his chosen wiry, unkempt beard.

She invited me into the kitchen, as she reminded me they kept no slaves, only seasonally hired men, and it was time for her to mix her and her uncle's daily palsy dose, and she dared not risk being late with the administering of it.

We exchanged many standard pleasantries, and, as was her way, she spoke little. I had been chatting cordially (which is not too difficult when one sets one's mind to it, and has had Bess as an excellent example), and she working, when she stopped.

"You were always kind to me, Jenny," she said abruptly as she pulled down mortar and pestle. "Thank you. When you looked at me you looked into my eyes, not at my arm." As she said this, her arm seized and she had to re-adjust not to see the pestle tumble from her now compromised grip.

I resisted the urge lunge forward and take it away from her.

I found myself thinking that I could not have been the only one to have looked so into her eyes. They were (as they had always been) a charming, light brown. Awash in trust and quiet goodness.

I nearly forgot what I had come here to say, so strong did the notion come to me that in just such eyes I might well have discovered a rival. A rival who had known you longer, your mind perhaps better, as longstanding correspondence might gain such a one.

"Caleb is well," I did said, for I had no response to offer to her unnecessary and disarming thanks. I did not speak loudly, but had no doubt that she had heard me. "Or was, quite well-asking to be remembered to you, not so long ago."

"Hush!" she said, her arm no longer a-tremble, her hands now stilled from her task. And then more loudly she announced, "It is made with hackberry-" and listed off several other ingredients of her homemade palsy elixir in a similarly loud voice, as I watched on not sure what was taking place.

Her voice stopped and she continued in a hushed tone, "quietly now, tell me. But not so loud as my uncle may hear."

"Your uncle disapproves?"

"He has been unsettled in his mind since some folk thought 't might have been Caleb rowing away that day that made our stones forfeit. He fears 'twas Caleb's bold nature, and 'twill get him shot."

"And well it might," I agreed, in low tones of my own, seeing no reason to speak against this eminent sense of Lucas Brewster.

I told her what I could-which was arguably not much-and she received it like sight to a blind man. She made me tell her twice. At some point she returned to the work of mixing the elixir.

"I shall tell him when the time is right," she said of her uncle, nodding. "He shall be better for knowing it."

I felt the time of my visit drawing to an end, yet she stopped her toil and took a step toward me. "Because you have carried this to us-what may I do for you in return?"

It seemed odd to me; small, crippled homebody Carrie Brewster offering a favor. And yet the moment her request for my bidding occurred, I found I needed no further prompting.

"Do you ever hear news of any of the other boys," I asked, as she attended on my speech eagerly. "The Tallmadges? You need not confess to me how you may come to know anything. You are away from the village here, woods and coves abound. 'Twould be nothing for a courier to find his way to you."

Her brows had drawn together. "Samuel," she said, and though I am as fond-or fonder-of Sam as any young man I may know, my hopes did drop a bit upon hearing his name, "has been captured at Valcour Island, and taken to the prison ship."

"The Jersey?" I asked, "-where they have sent Selah Strong?"

"I pray they live to find each other," she said, ardent hope within her voice.. "I pray Caleb is never taken to join them."

"And Ben?" it felt choked out, though it did not sound of it.

"Benjamin?" she said, and I refused myself any speculation upon her tone of voice. "I do not know how we might hear if he were so taken," her mind still on the news of Samuel's fate. "The last news I have of him is long ago, now. It was in a letter."

"A letter? Is it a very...personal letter?"

"It is not too private to share with you on such a day," she said, smiling. "Let me finish here and I will find it for you."

Bless her naivete for never once seeming to think me a Loyalist intelligencer, with all my questions and my unexpected call, my getting her to admit she had information and even a written communication from Continental officers.

Her uncle came in and she and he took their elixir as I was offered coffee. It was but a short break in his work of the day, and he left the house within moments of finishing. He is an elderly sort of fellow, but he is pleasant enough in his manner, and I could see he would have preferred to sit a bit longer with the two of us rather than return to his barns. For a Brewster of the line that begat Caleb, one might call his manners gentlemanly. Perhaps his nephew's are an anomaly. Perhaps they are related not at all by blood, but Caleb Brewster was set upon their doorstep by a bear when he was yet in his infancy.

Lucas excused himself, Carrie went to find the chest where she kept such correspondence, and returned with the letter for me to read. It was now far past the time I should have been going, particularly as I had had to leave Sally B. out with the wagon, there being no slaves or even servants here for her to visit with while I was with within. And she and I without a male escort such as Cleopas.

But I had no intention of leaving before opening the letter I'd just been given. What might I learn from it? About Benjamin? About Carrie Brewster in relation to him? About his life since he enlisted? Would I recognize the hand it was written in? The mind and heart that had formed the text?

Would I regain any contentment once its contents were known to me?

As I read, I found the letter from Captain Benjamin Tallmadge of the Second Continental Dragoons to be warm and friendly in its tone, the contents generally regarding those in Setauket that he missed, something of the rigors of camp life. There was nothing too specific about his military life to be classified as secret, there was nothing of overpowering or even deep sentiment, nor devotion exchanged or proclaimed. And, as she had said, it was an old letter, written within the six month of his first buying his commission. And so, also within the six month of the letter of farewell he had written to me.

I wanted to ask her how she had come to receive it. Wanted to ask her if she hoped to receive another some day, but I knew I should not. I have no wish to work against writing what I know here because I need to protect someone.

Suffice to say: Carrie Brewster has a letter from you, and sad confirmation of the rumors about Samuel. She is your friend, and you are hers, and though you wrote her from your new place with the Continentals, you felt no compunction to take your leave of her.

She has no way to get news to you.

Do you know about Samuel? Are such informations exchanged among enemy armies? And the Reverend? What knows he?

Do I dare attempt to pass such information on to the stray dog that frequents our boathouse?

And if so, how?


	13. Mercy Moment Murder Measure - MOMENT

**Moment:**

But my trip back from Brewsters' was not yet over.

We were not far from the furthermost edge of Lucas Brewster's orchard when Sally B. and I began to more fully understand what the absence (and possible loss) of Cleopas might mean to us.

Nearly in sight of the Hayman family farm (though their house is difficult even in the winter to see from the track which leads on toward the village), our wagon's wheel snapped its spoke.

Dismayed (and feeling even more acutely that I had over-stayed my visit to Carrie Brewster), I bid Sally B. to run on to the Hayman house or barn, see if anyone was about and ask for assistance while I stayed behind, contemplating the splintered wood and the possibility that we might well not make it home until after dark.

I confess, also, that following an afternoon keeping company with Carrie Brewster (which had been pleasant enough), the idea of calling upon a second house which held yet another young lady kept from village society (in a word, Merriment Hayman)-and what's more, overseen by some sort of nurse or rural governess-type figure-was not one which held for me much allure.

And no matter what Sally B. might say, it had nothing at all to do with the fact my frock had become quite soiled (and rumpled) as I had made my way unescorted (by such as Cleopas) through the Brewsters' barnyard to join Sally B. at the wagon.

I simply preferred to wait alone with my own thoughts, rather than commence a second (also unannounced) visit.

I do not recall the last time I might have shared words with Merriment Hayman.

The sequestered and rather bleak life of the Hayman family has no need to be rendered by me here; suffice to say it has ever been difficult to understand what possessed the sober, retiring parents of Merry Hayman to name her 'Merriment', unless they meant to try and call some of that feeling down and into their lives.

Certainly as he arrived with Sally B., Amos Hayman had nothing of merriment about his expression.

He spent several moments examining the wheel's damage, and announced that although he was not a wheelwright he might well be able to assist us.

Naturally I assumed this meant he would be able to repair it for us. But it presently became clear that he meant to keep our wagon and drive us back to the village in his own rig.

He and I sat the seat, with Sally B. facing backward in the bed with our broken wheel.

Truth be told, I have very little familiarity with Amos Hayman, and am certainly unused to sitting in close proximity to men outside of my family's circle of acquaintance; much less farmers with rougher, countrified manners.

"Can't send you on alone," Mr. Hayman said. His tone seemed to say he'd wish to. "Though I've little enough interest in taking myself into town."

It seemed humorous to me, him calling our village a 'town' as though it were a place of larger importance and commerce than it is.

"How'd you come to be out so late of a day, Miss Outerbridge? And alone, at that. Your man-he already gone, then?"

His address of me as Miss Outerbridge rather than Miss Jenny-something I was more used to hearing in reference to Bess-unexpectedly discomfited me. I felt my brow draw together. "Cleopas has gone with my father to York City," I said, feeling no need to mention the present uncertainty of that trip's fate.

"Oh," he replied, seemingly on the edge of bewilderment. "Will you be keeping him paid-wage, then?"

I felt Sally B. draw herself up to seated attention behind us, her weight shifting in the wagon's bed.

I informed Mr. Hayman I had no idea to what he was referring. I do not know if my tone of voice kept to this side of civility.

"Why, it's all over that Malachi Outerbridge's all set to free his slaves," he informed me, as though it were the most rote relating of facts, and not at all unsupported hearsay.

Sally B.'s hand slap-grabbed the back of my seat. I half-jumped in response.

I let him know this was the most baseless of gossips I had heard in some time. I tried very hard to keep my chin steady. Even the notion of such an idea circulating as gossip had stolen what little there had been (seated next to this disconcerting half-stranger) of my composure.

"'Twas that attainder Major Hewlett placed on Selah Strong's property," he went on, just as though I had not naysaid him. "The Major has some sort of...moral conviction...against slaveholding. A body that wants to make good friends with him can't ignore it."

"Why," I countered, emboldened by the flaw I'd found in his remark. "Richard Woodhull has a housefull of slaves-African and indentured alike!"

"Aye, he's that, and Hewlett's ower-good opinion already established. He needs no grand gesture to gain that man's praise."

"And you think, you think my father has it not?" He was right. Richard Woodhull had no need to court Major Hewlett. Having been a visitor at Whitehall with Mama, I had seen their likemindedness in action. Indeed, Setauket's magistrate could ascend no higher in Major Hewlett's confidence and amity than were he discovered as the major's natural brother.

At this, Mr. Hayman shook his head, like a master saddened by his pupils' lack of comprehension. "Man can't win with politics, Miss. Try to bunk with the Tories when they're on top. Should the Continentals-Tallmadge's runaway boys and the like-gain the upper hand, good luck trying to convince them you've reformed. And what to say for yourself should the Tories then re-gain power?"

He shared this conundrum in such a way that it was impossible to know if one side in the present war appealed to him more than the other.

I found myself so distracted and surprised by the content of his speech-this obvious misapprehension about Papa-I had no comment to offer him, in dissention or agreement.

He spoke on in his earlier vein about our house slaves. "If your Pa sets his slaves free, and finds he cannot afford them at paid-wage, my house could make use of a girl," he said, and here he turned about and actually looked at Sally B. "I'd pay a fair wage: food, bed of your own. Pleasant company of my daughter."

I found myself outraged at his impropriety. Offering work to our Sally B.! While I rode alongside him!

Sally B. at least knew better than to answer such a question. But her eyes had grown wide in a way that I could not ignore, and in which find myself yet thinking about.

Mr. Hayman left us at the front door, refusing an invitation to come indoors and warm himself even before it was offered. He was courteous enough to let us know he would take the broken wheel (which had ridden with Sally B. in his wagon's bed) over to the wheelwright's and arrange for its repair and for us to be informed when we might send someone out to his farm to place it on our wagon and receive it back in Setauket.

Before we stepped over the threshold and into the house, I made certain to catch her arm and ask Sally B. what she might even think she would do with something such as freedom.

"Go find 'Lijah," she told me, and something sparked in her face I don't know if I'd ever seen before. Elijah is her brother, lately owned by Selah Strong, and since Christmas and the attainder, sent off to York City (and possibly on from there) working for His Majesty's Army.

She went inside quick enough after that, and I tried not to let Hayman's idle talk stay with me as I went to tell mother we were home and share something (but not all) of my visit and the broken wheel. I said nothing of Ben Tallmadge's letter to Carrie Brewster. I said nothing of Amos Hayman's gossip and misapprehensions.

She said nothing of her obvious distress that had Cleopas or father been home, such an event would have caused far less concern and bother. Said nothing of her anxiety (like unto my own) over still not receiving word from them.

I thought Sally B. had forgotten about Hayman's chatter as well, but as I awoke when she climbed into the bed we share, her breath, warm in the cold of our room, blew across my cheek. "You find out, Miss Jenny," she said, low and slightly hoarse-as though it were a hard thing for her to speak. "You find out if Mister Malachi gonna let us all go free. I gotta know. Won't sleep right 'til I do."

I wanted to tell her not to be silly. There was no truth to such a thing. It would never happen. Papa had never so much as contemplated it. It was but a stranger's idle talk. But something inside told me such words would upset her, kindle anger in her. Instead I asked, through my own haze of being half-asleep: "Papa is not here to ask-how should I discover such a thing?"

"You can read, Miss Jenny," she said, tucking the counterpane under her chin now with an air of confidence. "Your papa's got a world of papers in his study. 'Answer's in them, sure enough."

She is not wrong. Papa's papers enough to fill several lesser men's libraries. He is not home, and his study stands vacant. I have spent enough time in the last years demurely clerking for him when he was most in need of it since Simon finished his apprenticeship and moved on to York City and the Fisks.

I write, as on display here, a smooth, readable hand, and my ability with sums exceeds that of most other girls. Of course Papa had never wished anyone to know I was assisting him in his business matters. I never worked in his office, but always in private. But I know things. Things not even Sally B. may suspect. Where he kept his most valuable papers. Where the monies are held. What there was of a code that he used for his most important dealings.

All that is left now is to ask: in his absence, would it be lack of faith in him to seek through such things for evidence to prove Amos Hayman mistaken? Would such action of itself prove me disloyal? Even as I try to vindicate him?

Will dear Papa ever return home for such a betrayal of mine to matter?

* * *

A/N:: moment - n. formal 2. importance 'the issues were of little moment to the electorate' (see momentous)


	14. Mercy Moment Murder Measure - MURDER

**Murder**

Yet again I find myself rising early. Perhaps earlier every day, as Sally B. vacates her rest in order to be available to the officers quartered in our home, and she must be biddable according to their changing schedules.

I tell myself it is only the absence of her warmth that wakes me, not false hopes that she is meeting again with a certain stray dog in our boathouse, not worries and coming-on despair over Papa and Bess—still not returned to us.

Not my own desire to abandon the sleeping world of undirected dreams and instead spend those precious few moments to myself indulging in nostalgia.

I tell this to myself even as I surreptitiously withdraw pen, ink and diary from where they are kept and write upon the present situation in the quarter-hour before dawn breaks—yet never surmount the longing to dwell upon the past.

In my solitude I recall a spirited evening and a game of hide-and-go-seek, where I had hidden myself near the water's edge along with Prudy Havens, who shortly grew weary of not being found (and thinking she was losing out on the fun of being caught) and so ran to hide where she might be more easily discovered.

Enjoying the evening coming-on, the sounds of the other young people playing the game in and around the trees and brush in that particular cove, I felt no need to be found too soon. In fact, I felt more than a little pride in the spot I had secured for my own.

It was a small luxury infrequently afforded to us, that end-of-evening unchaperoned play. Girls were meant to keep in twos, the young men expected to search for us in a pack. None of us were in full dress.

Mama would have said we were running the wild out, and spirits were certainly high. The young men's voices ran the scale from just-finished-changing all the way to the rowdy man's-voice of Caleb Brewster, who had returned for a brief holiday from his whaling adventures to visit with his family.

Every few minutes a pair of young ladies being found out caused giggles and titters to ring through the air, the sea throwing the sound of their merriment back toward the land.

I turned about within my hiding spot, to face the opposite direction (and surmise the continued safety of my choice, the coast having been originally to my back), only to discover I was not quite as alone as I (and Prudy Havens) had first thought.

There was another figure there, clearly not partner to the game. It was Benjamin Tallmadge, seated upon a large flat rock I knew to be used often enough by single fishermen. It no doubt still held the heat of the day's sun, and he was half-reclined upon it (for it was large enough to act as a natural divan), a book in one hand, lantern burning next to him.

Another loud burst of laughter came from the distance.

"You may as well come out, Miss," he said, without raising his head from the text. "Your partner has abandoned you. The laughter of the group grows further in the distance with each passing minute. They have washed their hands of finding you and have no doubt moved on to the next entertainment."

"Then they are fickle and faithless, and I shall not play with them anymore," I said, and using my hands to move aside the underbrush, came out of my hiding spot.

"A hard vow to keep, with the summer still young," he said, and slowly looked up from his page.

There was a straw between his lips and he was working it with his teeth like the stem of a pipe. His hair (which was almost never long enough for a proper queue) was three-quarters or more escaped from its ribbon, and he was in only a shirt and waistcoat, and no stockings or shoes to partner his breeches. His sleeves were rolled up, and a cravat for his neck was nowhere to be seen.

"Jenny!" he said upon realizing it was I who had been hiding, and he quickly repaired himself into a seated position, his book closed, thumb and finger to mark his place.

I sat down beside him, despite knowing it was my proper duty to seek out greater numbers than that of a single man and girl in company alone together.

He had not offered me the place. I chose it for myself.

"They do not truly care for the game," I told him, wishing that I were brave enough to remove my own stockings and shoes and place my feet off the rock and into the water the carefree way a man—the way Ben Tallmadge-might.

"You are mistaken, Jenny," he said, using his book in gesture towards me. "They care a great deal for the game. It is only that the game _you_ are trying to play, and the rules _you_ have chosen to follow, are not at all the game and rules that they have come to revel in." He twirled the straw in his free hand, and seemed quite pleased with his speech.

I thought for a moment.

"I can play at that game, too."

He smiled, and seemed on the cusp of laughing. "I do not doubt it. But you have proved adept at hiding. I congratulate you. Perhaps you are done playing games for the night."

"Perhaps," I said, my eyes not wanting to, but wandering over toward where the sounds of the others could still be heard (as he had said) growing farther away.

Me, knowing by all social graces and correct deportment that I ought be found among them.

I turned when he tossed the straw into the water before us.

"Do you ever think about the future, Jenny?" he asked me. "That is, the future beyond what they're all playing at?" He didn't look at me as he asked the question, he looked out, beyond where we sat to the water.

"You mean beyond betrothal, and marriage and children and so on?"

"Yes." His affirmation had a deep sincerity to it. Of satisfaction that he believed I understood him.

But I could not grasp his meaning. "Is there another future to consider?" I asked. "Are you speaking like your Reverend father? Of the Eternal?"

He shook his head, and his jaw seemed for a moment to tighten—in concentration, not in impatience-before he replied. "Not a personal future," he said, "but a collective future. How shall this place we call home be governed? How will it have changed, or not have changed, within our lifetime? And what part will we choose to play—or be required to play—in the making of that?"

I could see now in the lantern's light that from the book's spine he had been reading a philosophical text. He was speaking of politics. And quite possibly, of sedition.

But this dialog, however brief, had lit something within him, even as the lantern began guttering, its light growing less dependable.

He still looked away from where we sat, his gaze cast toward the water; dark now, its waves and rolls unknowable to the eye from where we sat. It was very like looking out into a future murky, yet unformed, through which charting a path would be treacherous and uncertain—and require a great deal of courage and tenacity.

I am too old, and had already left school before he had returned to Setauket to become schoolmaster, and so I did not know if this was how he looked when he presented his pupils with a new and thrilling principle in his classroom, but if it is I cannot imagine that they could remain unmoved by such conviction. Such obviously sincere deliberation.

"I do not want someone else to decide my fate in life," he said. "Nor the fate of the land I call my home, Jenny. It is God who grants to each of us self-determination. I am persuaded it is a grave sin to refuse to acknowledge that."

At saying this, he had stopped looking at the water, and turned, instead, toward me. The lantern burned between us, lighting our faces so that we could see one another, and though I had never felt the desire to kiss a man before, his eyes on mine in that moment affected me so that I thought I must take my hands and push against the rock beneath us to move backwards and away from this intimate distance, lest I transgress upon him (and my own reputation) in such a fashion.

Before I could make good on my thought (either the compulsion or the reaction), he reached his free hand toward me, toward the lock of my hair which I had dressed down, pulled back by a ribbon, but had now come forward, over my shoulder.

Yet his fingers stopped just short of touching it.

"What," I said, though it was not a question, and I had no expectation of how he might answer.

"I may live long years from now, Jenny," I can hear him say as though it was only hours ago, "but I will never see a prettier shade of hair than yours." He shook his head slightly with the declaration, and something of a smile dallied about his lips.

I was about to assure him—once my own lips agreed to do my bidding and not their covetous own—that I, too, had no wish to have my fate decided for me, when the brush to our back began to shake, and my mind recalled to me that it had been some minutes since last we heard any laughter.

Momentarily, young men and young ladies alike rolled out of the evening darkness of the trees and undergrowth, whooping and laughing, and I was caught, and none prouder than Prudy Havens that she had led them all straight to me.

Yet you, you had nothing to collect, neither shoes nor stockings to grab. Your text was already in your hand—your lantern turned over upon their arrival and gone dark. It should have been no surprise that you vanished, back to your thoughts—back to your contemplations.

Back to your world so completely I half-doubted that you had been there at all. Save for the unsettling pricking about my lips, the flush I could not for long moments shake, and the way my hair seemed to settle more heavily upon my neck and shoulder.

None of the others had even marked your presence, so total was your withdrawal, so diverting they found their present merriment.

* * *

I have just returned from a knock upon our front door. It is too early for Mama to yet be about, and two of our three officers are still abed. Sally B. had already answered to the knock (no doubt thinking it a matter of the soldiers' business, as it often can be) when I came down to stand at the foot of the stair, and spy upon the petitioner.

Of all people to be about at such an hour (considering the hours she must now keep working in the tavern until it closes of a night), it was Anna Strong.

Firstly, she asked after Corporal Eastin, our recent addition to the officer's barracks our home is half-become.

Sally B. told her he was not here, that he had left before breaking his fast (a remarkable choice for the corporal, as anyone who well knows him will tell), before the sun had risen.

This seemed to further discomfit Mrs. Strong, who was plentifully anxious in temperament without needing addition to it.

"Then I must ask to borrow the wagon," she said.

"I can't lend what I ain't got to give," Sally B. told her.

"Sally B.," and here Mrs. Strong grabbed our Sally B. by the arm, as though she were trying to make her understand something, or keep her from leaving where she stood. "Since the attainder I have nothing. Not one horse of my own, neither wagon nor cart. And my employer is little inclined to loan me his. I must get myself to Whitehall with all haste this morning. Your mistress will understand. I will have it back to you before luncheon."

"Miss Anna," Sally B. said, "Miss Jenny and I had to leave the wagon at Amos Hayman's. The wheel done gone broke its spokes, and its over at the wheelwright 'til it can be fixed and married back up with the wagon. Mr. Malachi took the other with him to York City. Outerbridges got not a cart left to 'em. The only horses in the stables belong to the officers."

Anna Strong looked as though she might scream. She bounced several times on her heels upon our front stoop, and without bidding Sally B. good morrow or good day turned and left.

It can have been no small thing for Sally B. to turn away Mrs. Strong when she was in need. Sally B. was born to the Strongs before Papa bought her for us. Selah Strong was her master, and his father before him—and Anna her mistress since the time she and Selah wed.

As I have noted before, Sally B.'s brother Elijah was the Strong's until the Crown's attainder was passed. And so it would be expected her loyalty to the Strong family would still be somewhere within her.

I stepped out from where I had been standing once the door was shut. When I asked Sally B. what could have so upset Anna Strong she said she didn't know, and wondered if she should go and tell Mama.

I said no, that we could share the visit and the request with her what time she awoke.

"Miss Jenny," Sally B. went on, "that Corporal Eastin—something's not right. He don't come home the other night 'til late, so late. And when he do, the breeches he give me—" she took me back to the laundry shed to show me.

"They got blood on 'em."

It was not so much blood as one might see from beheading a chicken, but it was a spray. Yet there was neither mud nor dirt upon the white breeches to say that he had been rolling about in a tavern scuffle. Certainly he had not been upon the ground.

It looked very sinister, there, that blood against the white.

Sally B. had been working, with little progress, to get the stain out. When the Corporal had come down this morning (in his second-best pair of breeches), he had been in such a hurry he had not even asked after them.

To Sally B., this had been a relief. She had no wish to be reprimanded for failing to satisfy him in her laundering.

To me, this is yet another in a string of mysteries to which I seem destined to never hold the key.

What, or whose, blood is it?

Where has Corporal Eastin rushed off to before dawn?

Is Anna Strong following him?

How can Whitehall be involved in something so dire?

Do I sharpen my watchfulness for who might be missing from the village this morning?

Has another bloodyback been murdered, as with Captain Joyce (whom I will not say 'may he rest in peace,' though it be genteel to do so)? Or is it a villager this time, robbed of his life and not only his livelihood, his wife, and his liberty, as Selah Strong was?

How terrible it must be to have become Anna Strong; her husband imprisoned, her wealth and slaves and status taken from her. She works now for her own keep, and has neither horse nor cart to her name. Her home is lodging for His Majesty's officers, her place of work their base of indolence and excess.

Her fate is no longer her own, and perhaps never shall again be.

I regret that it was not I who met her at the door.

The sun is rising, now. It begins to snow.

I wonder at what hour I will wake on the morrow, or if I shall sleep this coming night or not.


	15. Mercy Moment Murder Measure - MEASURE

**Measure**

 _(Some days after "Murder", and Anna Strong's unexpected call)_

It is being gossiped among the King's Men here: 'twas Abraham Woodhull of all people whose blood is most likely stained upon Corporal Eastin's breeches.

The officers in our house (I believe) at times forget—or choose to ignore—that I share a room and bed with Sally B., and this morning that were outside that door, discussing the news of their day and week. I could not hear all their speech upon the matter (Lieutenant Williams seemed determined to shush them), but it seems abundantly clear that their Captain Simcoe has not only returned to Setauket after being presumed dead in an ambush (and in fact having been captured by the Continentals during it), but that he has challenged Abraham to a duel down at the mill pond.

The duel-they waste no breath in speculating, but state as truth-the duel was over the honor of Anna Strong.

And so it is no wonder she was wild that morning to reach Whitehall and Judge Woodhull before sun-up.

I have never seen a duel (or even a challenge), and I daresay it is not likely many (if any at all) have been fought here in Setauket.

There is apparently a great deal of unsavory speculation about Mrs. Strong's role in the matter and her preference between the two men. This I _know_ Mama would not settle for being bandied about her home—true or not.

It is generally known in the village that Anna and Abraham were once expected to marry. But they are hardly unique in that. Plenty of other youthful romances have also taken different paths. So the notion of an alliance between the two of them (innocent or not) is no great leap.

But without her husband here to take her part, it seems to have left only Abraham to the job.

Or (and this is a far less-pleasant notion), 'twas Abraham who is believed to have assaulted her honor, and made Captain Simcoe (with Eastin by his side, I have surmised) the one attempting to redress the damage.

Certainly this is the interpretation of events the officers prefer, and Simcoe the horse they'd rather back in the race.

And yet it is the British who have made any such mess. The British who have taken Anna's husband off to a fate in which she cannot share, and it is the British who have left her without protection or home or means.

And now it is the British bandying her name about among her own village as though she had no more dignity than a camp follower.

I do rather hope that she and Mary Woodhull's husband are not behaving in a way that would garner the proper disapproval of a lady like Mama. And if they are, I rather hope never to learn of it.

I shall instead choose to believe they are childhood friends whose friendly bonds have endured over time, and whose present situations have brought them into the light for scrutiny by all.

* * *

I spent my time at schooling the children this morning, trying to think of the worst words I could to describe the King's Men (and wishing I'd paid more mind to Caleb Brewster's wretched—but colorful-tongue).

Since Major Hewlett requisitioned the school so that the schoolhouse might be used for his powder stores, the task of teaching Nan and Abner has fallen to me. I have not minded it greatly, even when they turn trying. I feel sad they have no school or school fellows to go to. They are both young enough that I can dare hope this will change, and that their elder sister will not be the only schoolmistress they will ever know.

This morning, before we started our lessons, Mama took me aside and asked if I would consider taking on Alexandra Robertson, the ten-year-old daughter of our close neighbor. Like my brother and sister she has been suffering from missing out on the society of a school room of children. Alexandra is a pleasant girl, whose academic prospects are not so daunting that I mightn't feel competent as her tutor. She is younger than Abner who is twelve, and will make a nice role model for Nan (who I confess, will soon likely outstrip her in grammar and sums), who is but eight.

I agreed with Mama that she might let the Robertsons know by note or by calling on them that we would be pleased to have Alexandra join us each day.

* * *

As Mama left to plan on doing so, I realized with that cool understanding that seems to take hold of me sometimes, that my opportunity had come.

It would be a perfectly reasonable thing for me to do to enter Papa's study in order to seek out a few supplies to add to what we used for our lessons. It was generally known that he had a nice, larger slate that would be more than natural for me to wish to make use of now that I would be instructing three pupils daily.

No one in the house would think to question my doing this.

And 'tis possible Sally B.'s patience (like my own) to prove (or, for me, to disprove) Amos Hayman's idle words regarding the future of Outerbridge slaves was wearing thin.

* * *

I said something of a prayer for this dubious action on my part before I entered through the connecting parlor door (his study also having a door to the outside for clients to use when he was present, without them having to call at and walk through the house), using the key from Mama's chatelaine which I had received with her absentminded blessing (certainly she could not have suspected I wished to have it to break-in and steal). But it was a non-religious prayer aimed more at the forgiveness of my earthly father than that of my Heavenly one.

In the days since Papa had set off for York City with Bess and Cleopas, as the workload for our slaves had grown heavier with the addition of another officer, they had been excused from taking the same level of care in maintaining this room to the level of the rest of the house. (And once Papa's fate had become uncertain, it was thought a necessity even less so.) And so it was no surprise the room felt shut-up, that some dust had settled about on ink pots and blotters—the frames of the two windows flanking the exterior door.

The light was not good, despite those windows (which brought in afternoon, not morning, sun), but I did not need to light a lamp to find what I was looking for, I knew the spot where the most important documents were stored could not be found by aid of a lamp—only by fingers knowing where and how to uncover it. I located what amounted to a latch quickly, and thrust my hand in without letting myself acknowledge fear of mice or spiders in cohabitation with the usually undisturbed papers there. There was the small, pocket-sized ledger book and several documents rolled together. I had no intention of going over them there (that would have required the lamp). I knew that now to keep up my ruse I must gather supplies for school teaching, and locate the large slate.

But before I could seriously set-to this, there was a terrible scrape and creak at the exterior door (I had closed the interior door to the parlor behind me), and what stood for a lock upon that door was broken, and the door thrust open.

I froze in my place, confused, not understanding why if my father was returned home he should need to break into his own property. Nor why he might visit his study before his family.

But it was not my father, standing just inside the doorway, the village track that ran beside the door visible behind him. What there was of the early morning light still not upon it.

"John Robeson!" I said, "What are you doing here?" I could not recall him having business dealings of any kind with my father. He is not a man who appears to do much business of any kind, unless such business occurs chiefly in the tavern, and among the officers that agree to tolerate him.

"You best leave, Miss Jenny," he said, though his polite address did nothing to sway me to his suggestion. He is a most wayward and unpleasant person, and hearing him speak my name—after having broken a lock to enter my family's home—only increased my dislike of him.

"What business can you possibly wish to accomplish here when it is no secret to the village that my father is gone away to York City?"

"You listen here, Girl," he said to me, having given up on using my name. "The British are looking for a paper—the petition to nominate Selah Strong to the New York Convention. And I happen to know your father has a copy of it, locked up in here for safekeeping somewheres."

He is lucky the hearth was weeks cold, and that I was not near the poker, hearing him speak of my father's business matters as though he had any understanding of them.

"It is true that he sometimes agrees to act as holder for copies of important documents," I said, and I felt myself tossing my head in a show of bravery I was no longer certain I felt—so many strangers telling me the business of a man I knew intimately. "But he has no copy of that document," I assured him, "He does not even know such a document exists."

"Quit with your mouth, Miss Jenny," Robeson said, and it appeared he had been doing some drinking already in the day, some of it held over from the night before. "You are prettier to look at when you talk less. I know he has it."

What a queer way to speak to a young lady, to compliment and insult her in a single breath. Not that I should have expected a pole cat such as Robeson to know aught of manners. "Then why not bring Major Hewlett here?" I asked. "Send his soldiers to ransack our home until they find it?"

He took a step that was either a stagger or the beginning of a threat forward (I could not tell between the two possibilities). "Because once, long ago, your father did a kindness for my mother," his mother had died some five years earlier. "He forgave a small loan she owed, required no payment of her. And I've no wish for him to lose his position—and _your_ home—by being found to be in possession of seditious papers—though a good Tory like Malachi is only holding them in safety for their owners, as his business requires of him. He's no rebel. Now step back into your house," his eyes flicked over toward the closed door to our parlor. "And I will find it for myself."

I had no intention of leaving him alone here, for there was plenty private bookkeeping among my father's papers in plain sight, without taking into consideration what I held hidden in my hand. That, and I would not leave a man who had come into my house like a thief in any part of that house. "What," I challenged him, "and take it to the British who will know where you have been? You cannot trick them, John Robeson. Unless it is that you already have such a paper on your person, and you mean to present it to them AFTER having ransacked my father's office, and say that it was here you found it—earning you your position as their lapdog, and earning my father unjust time in the stocks. I tell you; my father has no copy of such a document, nor any knowledge of it. No doubt you think it very clever of yourself to come here when he is not in residence to defend himself, and break-in to his place of business. What other secrets and private matters might you hope to become privy to amongst his personal papers and account books?" I was not keeping my voice quiet, I wanted someone to hear us, someone to come in and also shout-down what slander he was speaking about Papa.

His jaw had grown hard, and his face half-contorted at his being frustrated in his plans so. "If I do not find it," and here was his threat, "rest assured they will. And not even your pretty frocks—nor your sister sent away to York City—will remain untouched by their response."

"Get out of my house," I said. I already had the bundle I had discovered in my hands and hidden between the folds in my skirt and apron. I saw the slate but an arm's length away, and wondered if I could get to it how many steps toward him it might take to bash it over his head. Wondered whether such a blow might send him unconscious.

There was a flurry at the door behind him, boots first upon the snowy packed dirt of the village track, and then upon the wood of the threshold.

Someone had noted the door hanging open.

To both our surprise it was Lieutenant Williams. He gave John Robeson a distrustful look, which is more than Will Robeson has ever deserved.

"Miss Outerbridge," he addressed me, "I was given permission to come straightaway and tell you; your father has been sighted upon the North Road by Dr. Mabbs who was traveling home, and sends his greetings to you and your mother. He brings news from his dealings York City, and letters from Miss Outerbridge. He is well, Miss. He is well."

The lieutenant must have thought me something rather other than a caring daughter, as my response to him was half-hearted at best. I was stunned by his announcement, more so by his arrival in the midst of the stand-off that had grown between myself and this burglar.

And so in that moment, it was Lieutenant Williams of the King's army who proved the only person in the Outerbridge home to show any true feeling or pleasure at learning its master was safe, and soon to be returned to us.

* * *

I have risen early this morning to recount these occurrences, and no doubt in anticipation of when Papa might arrive (though I know not if today or tomorrow), and as I stepped out on the front stoop this chill day, it was Abraham Woodhull, a wagon full of cabbage or some such crop, and Anna Strong, sitting side-by-side as they pulled away from (what is now) DeJong's Tavern on their way to the North Road and York City, leaving Mary Woodhull holding their son, with only the cold company of Rachel Clark to comfort her.

* * *

[ _added at a later time_ ]

There are two addendums to this account of which I feel the need to make note.

The first being that I asked Lieutenant Williams to stay and watch over the study as I had to leave straightaway to consult the smithy on an interior wood plank and iron slots for it to bar that door from the inside, as I had only just discovered someone had broken in and the lock was shattered.

I did my best to keep from sending an arch expression toward Will Robeson.

The lieutenant proved amenable to this, and granted me the favor. And when I returned, assured me John Robeson had left but a moment after I—going thankfully (so the lieutenant reported) in the opposite direction of the smithy.

The smithy shall have the plank to bar the door in place by sundown.

The second (of which I am not proud, but feel I must render here) is that upon the matter of Anna Strong and Abraham Woodhull, I confess I have allowed myself at times to believe the worst about how their history might be at play in their present relations as a man and woman wed to other people.

And in those times, when I have believed the worst of them, I have felt shock, but more so pride. And I fear it is an unearned pride coming from my true heart. For can I truly bear witness that were their situation mine-were I to discover you had wed, or were now betrothed to another—would I be able to bury my feelings in a casket, or box them upon a shelf?

Or would I still seek you out, still pray for your own heart to find mine?

Am I generous and unselfish enough to surrender you to another, to congratulate you upon such news? And yet to see you about the village daily (as they must and do) and not desire you for my own?

I recall well enough your father's sermons upon that passage in Matthew's Gospel: "For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again."

And I find I've no right to any feeling of pride or superiority in such a matter as concerns Abe Woodhull and Anna Strong.

* * *

 **A/N::**

measure  
1\. To calculate (as in, Jenny's father's ledgers are ways to measure his clients and his business)

2\. To consider one's words, deeds, or actions carefully (as Jenny often does within the pages of her diary)

3\. a plan or course of action taken to accomplish a specific purpose (as Jenny's measured decision to take the measure or steps to get into her father's study)

4\. to take someone's measure, to make a judgement about a person in reference to a set or agreed upon standard (as Jenny does here with Will Robeson)


	16. Challenge - Against Thy Neighbor Pt I

**A/N:** _This "chapter" is made up of multiple entries written by Jenny over the course of a month. Please take a long pause at the lines dividing them, as her thoughts may jump and be less cohesive than in prior chapter entries which cover less time. This is only the first of several "section/chapters" that will deal with the episodes in its title._

* * *

We have had a social call from Doctor Mabbs today.

He has come by (but shortly, he's much to do) to clarify for us that we may have imperfectly received his message of encountering Papa traveling upon the North Road.

Dr. Mabbs did see Papa and Cleopas on his trip back from York City. It was early-on in the doctor's travel back to Setauket. Papa did tell him to send us his regards, and that he had letters from Bess to bring home. But the true message that was meant to be sent was that he was unable to return home directly, as there was urgent need for him to visit my brother, Michael, and his family in New Rochelle. James, the eldest, was expect to be on his way there from Norwalk to also meet with Papa.

What the nature of this urgency is was not shared with the doctor, and so he can do nothing to inform us further. Only, Papa was well enough for travel when he saw him, and this necessary side-journey is what has kept him still from us here.

Trying to keep her spirits up, I know, Mama told me later that by the time Papa returns, her loosened stays will inform him of the coming child before she can speak the news aloud.

* * *

It is no longer merely local gossip now, but confirmed that Anna Strong indeed traveled (as I saw) to York City with Abe Woodhull. He, to sell the last of her family's attaindered crop; she, to bring home Selah Strong from off the Jersey prison ship, so long as he pleased Judge Woodhull by signing a paper that stated he would not contest the Crown's attainder against his property. ('Twas Sally B. who brought me this news from one of Whitehall's slaves come to the village with Aberdeen to shop.)

Earlier this month, Mrs. Strong had been heard declaiming loudly to both the Magistrate and Major Hewlett as they sat hearing grievances in our former church, that no evidence against her husband was ever found.

And yet how simply I might now dispute her. Might dismantle her protest. For I've a copy of Selah Strong's treason in my possession. And with it I am proved as much in error as she. I, for thinking my father had no knowledge of such a document, much less a copy amongst his hidden things. A copy showing the signatures of many men in the village, and several from the countryside. Influential, good men; frustrated younger men who looked up to him. A copy of the petition to send Selah Strong to the New York Convention (for so it is notated) as a delegate. Here, among Malachi Outerbridge's things.

In his daughter's hands, all the proof needed to send ten or more men (could they all be found) to the prison ship Jersey (or worse), all that would be needed to keep Selah Strong himself there indefinitely. To curse those men with the fate Carrie Brewster told me had befallen Samuel Tallmadge.

Though they've none of them enlisted, none of them taken up arms.

Only but put signature to paper, wishing to send someone to represent us in matters of governance.

And in doing so committed treason; without violence, without limitation to its being prosecuted and punished.

And yet there is no thought in my mind but to think of a way to keep such a damning paper safe—or destroy it altogether, though it be no true property of mine.

It shows no signature of any Outerbridge. And yet it was given here for safekeeping. Given, and accepted.

Papa cannot have forgotten he possessed such a thing.

* * *

It has come to us that Selah Strong has died some months ago, upon the prison ship Jersey.

I try not to think of Samuel, or of Carrie Brewster hearing this news.

I wonder, do you know? That Selah was there, or that he has died in that frightening place? That everything was taken from him before he lost his life as well?

I hope you do not know about Samuel. Do not know that he is there, no doubt also teetering upon losing his own life.

I pray you do not know.

I think I would rather not know.

* * *

I have again managed to overhear some of the officers billeted with us. They were lingering at table while Sally B. started her tidying up. Eastin and Williams were discussing Captain Simcoe's (an officer with concerns oft on Eastin's lips) recent return to Setauket and service to His Majesty. Eastin was informing Williams of what he knew in the matter.

"Captured by Continental Dragoons," he said, "bloody damned ambush."

Williams grunted, or made some other unmemorable reply.

"And the names among those men you will find familiar enough: names of Tallmadge and Brewster!" Eastin declared with some gusto, as though they were the punchline in a tavern jest.

"Steady on, Eastin," Williams said. "Those names run like wildfire through this village. What say you we do? Jail them all? Third cousins once removed? Step-fathers and maiden aunts?"

"A Tallmadge and a Brewster," declared Eastin with a swear I will not write herein, "That's who's responsible for the wound to Captain Simcoe, his disrespectful treatment and his capture."

"I'll not wish the village torn apart over his ordeal, impressive though his braving it may have been. I like it here," Williams countered.

"Bah," sneered Eastin, perhaps not wishing to be too bold, as his rank of corporal places him well under the Lieutenant.

"Once we get the politics of the place sorted, I've a mind to settle here," Williams went on. "There are many pretty girls about, and the ones less pretty make up for it by being highly agreeable."

"I cannot see you nursing along an orchard," Eastin replied, "nor mothering cattle, no matter how fetching and rich the wife you take."

"No doubt some land, some earthy task is just what I shall wish for once this war is settled," said Williams, and I had to walk on, away from my listening post, lest I be discovered by Sally B. coming through to the kitchen.

And so I have learnt it must be you and Caleb who have wounded Eastin's revered Captain Simcoe—and not thought to protect your kin by hiding your names. (For what other Tallmadge and Brewster might there be so tight-woven among Washington's men that their names would be so linked?) How very grave your indiscretion may yet prove, for if Eastin knows of it, he will tell all soon enough.

I take no comfort in this, save knowing that it brings me proof you yet live and faithfully serve the Patriot cause (and Caleb as well).

But I cannot think Lucas Brewster would not give his nephew a tongue lashing for such thoughtless work, as now each and every Brewster and Tallmadge shall bear the burden of that connection; for little as even I know of him, I well know Eastin's best Captain Simcoe is no one with whom to trifle. And I am now left to wonder if it is he who set John Robeson on the track of this worrisome petition.

And whether it be Tallmadge and Brewster names he hopes to find thereupon.

* * *

The wheelwright sent his boy over this morning to say that our wagonwheel is repaired, and with permission and payment it would be delivered out to Amos Hayman's farm and put upon our wagon, and then driven back to our house in the village. (The wheelwright is often at the disposal of Major Hewlett's men, else we would have had it back far sooner, yet serving the Crown has given him a sight of village work he must put aside until the time to take it on opens up for him.)

Following lessons, I expected the wagon returned to us at any moment this afternoon. (Surely Amos Hayman is growing weary of boarding our team—no matter how neighborly he appears in the gesture.)

Just after two by our clock, the boy arrived back, put the wagon and horses away and came to the kitchen door, carrying with him the distressing news that Richard Woodhull has been shot, most desperately. He reported that Dr. Mabbs was with him at Whitehall, and his son Abraham as well.

The shooter is unknown, though it is said Captain Simcoe is sworn to discover him.

Corporal Eastin was not at the breakfast table this morning, and so I wonder if he was not also attending upon Whitehall at the time.

The whole village waits upon tenterhooks to hear of Judge Woodhull's survival, or death.

Oddly, there was also news today that a particular horse of Major Hewlett's has died, rather nastily, inside Reverend Tallmadge's church.

Mother will no doubt be pleased at the Major's loss, but further saddened at the continued desecration her once-beloved church, as dead horseflesh is a business for the gluemaker, not the clergy.

* * *

Who should wish to kill the Magistrate? I ask myself. The men's names on the petition to send Selah Strong to the New York Convention? I know these names, I know these men. Would they not more likely strike out against the King's Men than the magistrate who assists those men?

Richard Woodhull would not have his position if Setauketers did not have some faith in him and his judgment. The matter of the gravestones seems long ago and soberly settled. Of those who might have argued with him I can think only of Anna Strong, and she got her way from him in the end. Had Selah still been alive she might have brought him home.

Would she seek Judge Woodhull's blood to appease her loss? A loss for which she might blame him?

* * *

I do not know how to say what I think I must say. To write things here, which could someday be found might seem a folly. And yet, should the Continentals come, what word but my own might save Outerbridges from being tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on rails? And so in writing here I may damn or bless my father, my family entire, but I think I must take the risk and do so.

I have said already in my father's secret place I found several documents and a small ledger book. Among these documents was, surprisingly, a copy of the petition for the New York Convention naming Selah Strong. Malachi Outerbridge's name was nowhere to be found upon it.

However, in the ledger book which I have studied, using my knowledge of the system in which my father encoded his business dealings, I have found monies designated using his code for Selah Strong.

I say this, and yet it has been long years since I have seen Selah Strong in my father's study on business, or in this house socially. The transactions are dated, well before Selah's arrest and sentence. In point of fact, they go back closer to the time the petition was dated. As though Selah (and my father) fully expected the likelihood of him having his estate and fortunes taken over by the Crown. And so here is a list of assets (mostly money) that is designated as his. Kept secretly among this ledger book in such a way that Major Hewlett's attainder would never be able to touch it.

It shows that Sally B., who came to us around that time, is not our slave at all—but still Selah and Anna's—my father paid a yearly rent upon her into Selah's hidden account.

I see facts in this ledger book I can scarcely believe, it shows such a different Papa than I had come to understand.

It is no wonder we do not risk ourselves. It is no wonder we entertain and board officers in our home, and by doing so surrender it, in hopes to keep them out of Papa's office, and the treason it safeguards.

* * *

Today, I find I would not be over-shocked to learn 'twas an Outerbridge who shot Richard Woodhull, an Outerbridge involved in the loss of Major Hewlett's prized horse.

To find that Papa has not yet returned home because he has bought himself a commission.

Anything should happen, and I would now be wise enough to swallow back any protest of my own understanding. I have never felt my own apprehension so lacking.

* * *

I find no papers at all to support the notion that Papa plans to free our slaves in order to curry further favor with Major Hewlett.

This will disappoint Sally B. (as may the news that she is still owned by the Strongs). I am not confident in how to manage her.


	17. Against Thy Neighbor - Part II

_Guns_

We have passed a very worrying number of days.

When I think of Papa arriving home, I no longer feel it will prove as relieving an event as I had once thought.

I have returned the papers and the coded ledger book to the study's concealed spot, but I have kept the petition copy back. It feels as dangerous to replant it there as it does to fold it within the binding of this kept-secret diary.

I puzzle over whether to put the copy (the original of which John Robeson told me was the object of Captain Simcoe's desire) to rest in the boathouse cabinet, where a certain stray dog may find it and know how best to use it as proof there are still men in Setauket who are willing to risk themselves for the Patriot cause.

I turn this quandary over in my thoughts without respite.

Similarly, without respite, I refuse to let myself think on Samuel, only that I recall I must pray for him, and that if my own sorrow for him is the trial I must bear in this, he is bearing far worse, and no doubt far-more valiantly so.

It is said Anna Strong stood upon the deck of that very ship (the _Jersey_ ) on her trip to York City, thinking to collect Selah but learning of his death-but I have not the courage to approach and ask her if she sighted Samuel, or even knew that your brother was also on-board.

I should, perhaps, make a plan to re-visit Carrie Brewster and let her know Eastin's Captain Simcoe is on the track of Brewsters. Though I know not what steps she might (or could) take to shield herself from such a hunt.

* * *

Mama has received a rare letter today. It is from Papa, and she has read it to me. At the time of its writing he was in New Rochelle, with hopes to be able to return to Setauket and us, soon.

He gives reports on Amity and baby Malachi, and informs us James is well and soon to be a father also. But there is no mention of Michael.

A curious thing, him to write of Michael's wife and child _and James_ —almost as though (to any person unfamiliar with our family) James were Amity's husband, and in whose home Papa was staying.

Mama's grave face held all the concern such a letter might inspire in a mother (or a sister).

Something is wrong in New Rochelle, but we must wait for Papa to return and recount it in person.

Papa adds, in language most oblique, that if anyone enquires after him, we are to say that he fell ill during his travels home, and has been detained with his convalescence. And yet, he does not write in such a way as to share with us that he has been at all ill. Only that we are to so mention an illness should anyone enquire.

Certainly he would have shared with Dr. Mabbs any pains or imbalances in his humours had he been feeling ill, Dr. Mabbs as good a hand with a man as with a horse, it is commonly held.

* * *

I will not begin this entry with any attempt at salutation or pleasantry: Major Hewlett (who Dr. Mabbs shared with us had to shoot his own mount) has ordered the arrest (of all people anywhere) of Lucas Brewster.

 _Lucas Brewster!_

The Major's horse was fed an apple the doctor believes was tainted with poison in some way from a bowl which also holds the apples from which the Major eats. The apple, it has been agreed by all without objection, was bought from Brewster's orchard.

To say, of all Brewsters, half-crippled with palsy Lucas Brewster set out to poison a British officer (or his horse) is only slightly less unbelievable than to charge Carrie with such a crime.

It sounds more of the work of a certain stray dog, to me, though I cannot think what such a feat might accomplish for the Continental Army—the British are strong in their numbers (particularly on the water), and it would be nothing for their navy to drop off another Major in Setauket before afternoon, should we render this one further useless by death.

And yet, Woodhull and Hewlett do sit side-by-side (often, but most-publicly) when the villagers enter the barracks church to have their grievances heard in the assizes. And the person I can most think has a large grievance against the two at present is Anna Strong.

I must stop thinking this way. Certainly it is unchristian.

It is said Lucas Brewster has been shackled in the tavern cellar; so bragged the young private who came to our door to announce that in light of the Magistrate's shooting, all guns in the house must be brought out to Major Hewlett by luncheon tomorrow.

(One is meant to assume it is to examine the weapons and attempt to locate the guilty party, but it may just as likely be an easy way to leave Setauketers without any defense, or recourse-by-force. Something any King's Man must surely applaud.)

* * *

I impressed Sally B. into attending upon me in the matter of carrying the Outerbridge pistols and rifles to Major Hewlett this morning.

When he learnt we were going out and why, Abner insisted on coming, and so I let him hold the small pistol, which Papa has always declared was more for decoration than function. It has a beautiful whalebone grip, though I cannot recall Papa ever wearing it as any sort of decoration. Perhaps he did so as a young man-about-town in York City.

* * *

A queue had already formed when we arrived, Sally B. with an antique chest of dueling pistols that had belonged to the Belard family. I had Papa's two Charleville muskets, which together at nearly 20 pounds made for quite an armload, and oil from them spotting my kerchief, no doubt.

We had walked the rise of the hill up toward the table set out by Major Hewlett, and taken our place in line. Further up near the table, Major Hewlett could be heard holding court. He blessed Abe Woodhull for participating.

I should, perhaps, have recognized Reverend Tallmadge's head and shoulders (they were visible over that of the shorter men) as he strode through and past the others present to the head of the line, but I did not until he spoke—and then there was no denying him.

And he was as grand as ever—no thought to who he was facing down, no holding back his disgust at every villager being grouped under suspicion of the Judge's shooting. His eloquence was like fresh water to the thirsty shipwrecked. And yet there was little to be had of discretion in it. I did not mark the lack of it. He spoke what I wished to hear, and in the tone I wished to myself use. He proved himself, as I had long-believed, an equal if not a better to our wounded magistrate in discourse and articulacy.

I could not have been more moved, more transported by words had they been spoken by his son—or Thomas Paine himself.

"May I hold something for you, Jenny?" I heard at my elbow, and it was Abe Woodhull, having just finished his turn with the Major and his clerk.

"Thank you kindly," I said, feeling more than ever after hearing the Reverend like I needed to arrive at that table with powerful words of my own, elegantly rendered, and a little impatient with having my thoughts interrupted. "But they are no trouble," I protested, "And they are _Outerbridge_ weapons. An Outerbridge ought be seen turning them over." I tore myself away from staring at Reverend Tallmadge's noble figure to turn and look Abraham in the face.

A deeper frown line appeared between his brows. "Malachi is still not returned, then?"

"No," I knew the answer expected of me by Papa himself. "He is convalescing from an illness, and cannot travel at present." Craning my neck, I tried to resume watching the Reverend and the Major.

"That is sorry news," Abraham seemed not to notice my preoccupation. "I am certain your mother wishes him home."

"But all talk has been of _your_ father!" I fully turned my attention (against my will) away from the Reverend Tallmadge. "We hear terrible things, and keep him daily in our prayers."

"I'll thank you for that," said Abraham with a nod. "We are hopeful he will recover."

"I cannot think of who would have done such a wicked thing—though I have tried," I said, though most likely I should have not let on that my thoughts tended so in the matter.

For the shortest moment, Abraham looked at me as though he had never quite seen me before—as though we had never met long ago as children in the village, our acquaintanceship never intimate yet always in effect, however shallow the depth to which it might have settled.

A look, and then he was back to where we had been a moment prior: passing the moment with small cordialities.

"He is too stubborn to let anyone have the upper hand for long," he said, which is about as perfect a description of Richard Woodhull as one is likely to hear.

"And you think to find the instrument of his wounding in this way?" I raised my eyebrows toward the table before us. "Moreso than to ponder who might in some way benefit by his loss?"

The corner of his eyes creased in a way I have come to expect in tandem with spoken words (generally unpleasant ones), but he said nothing in defense nor in praise of Major Hewlett's scheme to smoke out his father's would-be assassin.

It was Walter Havens who approached him from behind and laid a hand upon his shoulder in way of greeting, and so Abraham no longer had to answer my perhaps-too-keen questioning.

The new arrival nodded his greeting to me, touching his hat and bobbing his head. "Miss Jenny," he said. "That's quite a good-looking pistol, there, Abner," he said to my proudly-grinning brother. "I should be loathe to give it up, had I one like it."

Abner's grin stretched ear-to-ear.

Mr. Havens and Abraham exchanged a few words, some of which I could hear, and some I could not.

I found myself with the freedom to examine them as they spoke and Sally B., Abner and I waited in the line.

Walter Havens, Prudy Havens' uncle, has a boat of his own (which the Regulars have not taken from him, neither have they greatly interfered with his trade, yet), and is known to be a plain-spoken and sympathetic sort of man. His wife died before Major Hewlett and his soldiers arrived, and his children are with families of their own. He has a grown daughter, married and living away from Setauket; we are perhaps meant to forget her father named Liberty, and she is now more commonly referred to in conversation as Libby.

And I now have first-hand knowledge (undeniable even in the lowest candlelight) that his signature graces the petition to send Selah Strong to the New York Congress. And so, he is a Patriot. And though his name be neither Brewster or Tallmadge, a patriot in danger. For Robeson or some redcoat will find the original—or even, God forbid—find the copy, and things will go as badly for him as they have for Selah, for Samuel—for Lucas Brewster.

And then there is Abraham Woodhull. Brother of Thomas, son of Richard, husband to Mary and father to Thomas. Surely that is how he is thought of nowadays—perhaps even by myself. But what about son of Siobhan? What of the always-smaller-than-the-other-boys, yet fierce as fed fire Abe? He feared none when it came down to what was right and fair. He'd not tolerate bullies—he'd not hesitate to jump Caleb Brewster himself, and match him wild for wild if his sense of fair-play were tweaked enough.

And what about that other title he wore all those years? Best friend of Benjamin Tallmadge. Benjamin Tallmadge, Student and later schoolmaster. Benjamin Tallmadge of the Connecticut Dragoons. Benjamin Tallmadge, Dedicated Patriot.

Yet Abraham's signature is absent from the petition. Then again, awarding the man of the woman you once (or still) loved with a position of some power and influence (however illegal) perhaps trumps one's patriotism.

We did all hear him say his oath to the King, not long ago.

And yet you were his best friend, too. No doubt in the minds of any villager the affection was mutual.

Is it a tragedy between the two of you, then? One to fight for King, the other for Liberty from tyrannical monarchs? Or is it something else that you saw—that you would have always seen and always known inside the outmatched bully-beater, something which lies dormant even yet, until its embers are stirred and troubled to flame?

Abraham Woodhull, Tardy Patriot?

Two men stood before me, each with things to lose, but only one I knew for certain was on the coming precipice of immediate peril. Both Robeson and the Regulars were searching for the petition, even if the village at large did not yet know it.

I turned to Sally B., and told her she must tell Walter Havens to bring what was left of his catch to the house this afternoon—to bring it by the kitchen door, himself. I stressed to her that he must come himself and use that door.

She looked at me like I was acting more than a little strange, but did not question me aloud.

"Mama has said she has a craving for fish," I told her, "and with us having to do _this_ ," I jostled about the rifles in my arms, "we have lost our chance to buy the best at the wharf."

"He must come to the kitchen door, himself," she repeated.

"Yes. And come tell me when he arrives."

"He's to wait for you?"

"Yes."

"Uh-huh. But you can't speak to him yourself. He right over there, Miss Jenny."  
He was, in truth, barely a yard away from me, still speaking to Abraham Woodhull.

"Do as you're told, Sally B.," I said, as I might say to Abner, my voice probably less polite than it might have been without the ill-feelings of knowing a secret about her that I wasn't telling painted upon it.

"My dear Miss Outerbridge!" I heard the Major exclaim upon seeing us in the queue, and he strode over to our group, causing Walter Havens and Abraham Woodhull to scatter like chickens when a carriage drives by.

"This is—this is shocking, and you must accept my apologies." His uniform was impeccable. It was as though he floated over mud, over puddle or dust. It appeared for all the world that he began each day with a new-made wig. "With your father still detained on business, I did not for a moment expect you to take such a task upon yourself!"

"I am sure it is no more trouble for us than for the other citizens of Setauket," I said. "I have Abner to help, and our Sally B."

"Ah, yes, your father's man—"

"Cleopas,"

"He is with him, still."

"They are expected home any day, Sir."

"Yes, that is good to hear. But this is appalling! A young lady caused to carry weapons to the barracks!"

(In point of fact I had seen at least two other young women-one married, one with an ailing father—in the queue, and he had paid them not a moment's mind. Then again, they were in rough brown cloaks of no particular beauty or fashion. And I had worn my dark green wool with the black velvet-lined hood.)

"A certain private came to the door yesterday and said we were to bring any guns to you before luncheon, should we wish to avoid incarceration."

"But where is Corporal Eastin?" He looked genuinely discomfited. "Could he not have submitted them for you? Where is his head? Or Lieutenant Williams? Surely you could have enlisted his aid?"

Not having civil words to share regarding either of these two gentlemen, nor what it might take for me to 'enlist their aid' upon a matter, I merely smiled, though not broadly.

"Well, let us see here, let us see," the Major muttered to himself, compelling us to the front of the line (past others who had waited longer, and had already lost something of their place when the Reverend refused to wait his turn), by taking my elbow (I had no arm to give him as I was holding both muskets).

Upon arrival at the table, he relieved me of both, making certain his clerk marked the guns down as my father's—and not mine.

"Though this is all entirely for the sake of due course. Mr. Outerbridge has been away from Setauket for weeks," he said, apparently absolving my father of any possibility in being the shootist, and my mother and I being too silly, or too retiring, to possibly know how to load—much less fire—a shot.

He balked at Sally B. and the case of dueling pistols. He lifted the lid and saw them lying there, the Belard name carved upon the case. "These are," he offered, "a family treasure, I do not doubt. From years gone by," he said more loudly, almost over our heads, as if trying to let the others know he by no means believed my family might support the practice of dueling. "They will not be needed, but may…continue to gather dust in their case as they clearly have so done for long years," he finished quickly.

It was Abner's turn to present the short, whalebone handled pistol. No doubt he expected it to be made-over, something like Walter Havens had done upon seeing it.

"Oh, dear me, no," the Major declared. "We shall not need this," and he waved the pistol, and Abner, away. "That is far too small to be the culprit. It would not be able to fire anywhere close to the distance over which Rich—the Magistrate—was shot. It is for closest range possible. A last line of personal defense, if you will."

With that, and a few other social words, we concluded our business with the British Army, hopefully, for the day. At least until the officers return to be fed and to sleep.

And I needed Walter Havens to pay his call to the kitchen before that.

It was then an hour or more before luncheon.


	18. Against Thy Neighbor- Part III - Letters

There is more to recount than I feel I am likely to have time to so do. Certainly not with any eloquence.

Firstly, I see that I have concluded my last entry without relating my interaction with Walter Havens.

Shortly before midday, Mr. Havens did bring what was left of his catch to the kitchen door, and Sally B. obediently called for me to come see.

At that time of day it is no surprise he had what would have been of very little interest to our household any other day left to sell. Nevertheless, I entered into parley over a price for what there was remaining of his catch.

I knew I could not allow the negotiation to go on very long before being discovered (by more than just Sally B.), and my heart was barely in it, hoping only not to owe too much for what he had to offer (and dreading having to explain my abrupt inability to exercise restraint regarding the household accounts to Mama).

I confess I do not even recall what Havens was saying when I moved to interrupt him in a way that had to have proven unsettling.

As he was caught off-guard, I was struck suddenly with the realization that nothing in my education had prepared me for such a moment. Young ladies are taught deportment, they are schooled in being proper and suitable when in company. We are not trained in ways in which to be certain one is taken seriously. And I knew enough to know that wearing the right color or fabric—tying a ribbon just so—were to be of no help in this particular—this _dire_ —endeavor.

I attempted to call that which years of watching and listening to two men of Setauket, highly esteemed and greatly respected, had shown me into effect. I attempted to speak with the combined authority and clarity of Judge Woodhull and Reverend Tallmadge. And told myself I must believe my words would be similarly received.

"You must leave Setauket," I said, making no effort to try and disguise the worry in my voice or countenance.

"Miss _Jenny_?" Walter Havens said, as one might expect-befuddled by my abrupt conversational change from buying the day's fish one moment to warning him away from his established home the next, though he had to have marked the unusual circumstance that _I_ should be arranging the purchase of fish (and a late-in-the-day one) and not Cook or Mama.

"You must not ask how I know," I said, and I prayed he would not press me to tell him, "but _you_ must know first that the King's Men—and John Robeson—are in search of the petition to send Selah Strong to the New York Congress," I had to stop him before he began to speak in protest. I raised my voice in a way I had certainly never been taught (though only firmly and loudly enough to over-speak his beginning protests), "Furthermore, I know without a doubt, your name to be signed to such a document. You must take all precaution." Here I extended him coin, though we had not yet jointly agreed upon a price. "You are a good man, Walter Havens. I have no wish to see you jailed." I did not list further the things I would have no wish to see His Majesty's Regulars enact upon him.

It was clear he had no expectation in the slightest of hearing such words from, of all Setauket, Jenny Outerbridge. He took a moment to collect himself.

 _Did he believe me? Did he trust me? Did he doubt my words or actions; me, an Outerbridge—well-known since the arrival of Major Hewlett's garrison as Loyalists of the highest degree? Did he, perhaps, think my words a trap?_

 _Would he repudiate my warning? Demand to know how I came by such knowledge?_

He cleared his voice, laid the fish atop the woodpile for our kitchen cookfire which was in arms-reach, and without counting it, accepted the coin from my hand.

"Do the others know?" he asked, before catching himself. His eyes were looking wild with concern, and it was clear he was thinking very quickly. "Do you…know of the others?"

"I know," I told him, trying to keep whatever I had been able to conjure of Richard Woodhull and the Reverend in my voice. "But I cannot request their presences at our kitchen door without causing talk."

In this, he agreed.

"If you find you cannot go home," I told him—though I've no authority to do so—"our stables may shield you for a night—though not likely more." But in this I perhaps overstepped myself.

He nodded, did not thank me, still seeming startled by the encounter, and said no more.

I thought for a moment I had not hung on to what I had been able to summon of the Judge and the Reverend. This was why he did not mark my final instruction. And yet, I felt most strongly I had no wish to become further firm or further authoritative. Such words were character traits to which I had never aspired. I resented having to manufacture such things from within myself. Being desperate and unpleasant had made me cross. The world had fallen out of balance.

It was the King's Men who had brought me to this: telling grown men their business, instructing them on where they might seek sanctuary for the night, addressing them as not only their equal, but their better.

Brought me to this and yet stranded me, as I have said, by the fact that _I_ had no freedom to walk about the village conversing with whom I pleased. Had I been Papa, had I been even young Abner I might have, over the course of several days, arranged quick, private words with all but two or three of the names on the petition.

And now perhaps it was growing too late, and Walter Havens, himself in peril, was left to attempt such a task. Or to leave the village without finding the opportunity to do so at all.

It is yet another thing His Majesty's greed for these colonies has taken from me.

I shall place it upon a list alongside the carefree innocence of my youth, any pleasant society, the honor of my family, and my foreseeable romantic future.

* * *

'Twas Sally B. who stepped out from behind the door once Walter Havens had departed. I thought—erroneously—she did so only to accept the fish I'd gotten us.

"You done been in your Papa's study," she said to me. "Where else you find a paper like that? With them names on it? _Rebel names_."

"There is nothing there regarding freedom papers, Sally B.," I told her, and I probably had something of the schoolmarm in my voice.

At this we had something of a spat, which I will not further shame either of us with re-counting in detail here. In the end I lost my temper, no doubt brought on by my own guilt of having withheld from her the truth I _had_ found.

"Far from being free," I told her—and in the moment I fear I may have relished it. "For what I found shows you are not at all Papa's to free. You are still property of Selah Strong, and in his death, of his wife, Miss Anna. Papa has only been leasing your services here. His ledger shows what is paid into the Strong account yearly. _For you_."

This concluded our spat with some finality, and we quit one another's company.

* * *

Within the hour, Papa was announced as having returned home. 'Twas Nan who ran about the house and yard telling us of it.

We assembled in the sitting room (thankfully free of officers at this time of the day) to greet him, including Sally B. (who gave a very gloomy greeting which on any other day would have been remarked upon), Cook and the kitchen girl. Papa stood with Cleopas just to his back, and looked not at all of a man who had been ill—but not of a man who had no cares in the world, either. He greeted each of us in our turn.

Myself, he presented immediately with several letters in Bess' hand, which he had been carrying within his coat.

"I regret, Wife," he said to Mama, "that our conversation I shall have to postpone some short space longer. News has come to us on the road—indeed it had traveled as far as Huntington—that Lucas Brewster has been arrested, and I mean to discover about it what I can, and resolve several pressing business concerns in the village before the afternoon is lost."

And so, after arriving home and being indoors for less than a quarter of an hour, Papa had left us again.

* * *

As we waited for Papa's return (I would say none more than Mama, with her news of the baby—but I must consider also my own need to speak privately with him), I had an hour or so over which to read Bess' communication, which I did. And I daresay in less-concerning times, her letters and their contents would swell entire pages of this account.

As it stands, she is well and happy. Delighted in York City and her new life at the Fisks. Even the terrible child of Mr. Fisk's dotage brings her nothing but joy (or did at the time of her writing).

She has seen enough of the city to know she wishes to see more. The Fisks have a wide acquaintance, including some Quakers from Oyster Bay (the Fisks transact much business with those of the Quaker faith, as the deceased Mrs. Fisk had family from among their numbers), in whom Bess seems to take an interest (though she has uncharacteristically refrained from mentioning if this Oyster Bay family has unmarried sons, though unmarried sons are common enough in most families, I daresay).

She writes of her travel into the city: "It stood, visible as we passed, though from a safe-enough distance we were told: _HMS Jersey_. That very ship where they have sent Selah Strong as his punishment. It was thrilling and gruesome to see it, towering over us as we were brought into the harbor. No prisoners were visible to us upon its decks, but our boatman declared he has often enough seen inmates jump—only to be shot as they try to escape, or drown in preference to living in chains upon it another day. And though the smells of the wharf are far from pleasant, the ship gives off such an odiferous scent I think 'twould be hard for one to ever shed it—even were they released from such bestial captivity."

She has devoted nearly half an entire leaf of paper to detailing a new frock she is sewing for herself, and included a piece of the fabric she chose.

I am an ungrateful sister and I can hardly stand it. So much news and goodwill in her written word. And I cannot enjoy a quill stroke of it.

I want to shoot holes in the _Jersey_ and sink it to the bottom. Any good Setauket boy could swim himself to safety. I have never yet met a King's Man who could swim.

I want to declare no young lady may wear a new or flattering frock until our freedom from King George is secure and our families are returned home. Why should we dress gaily? Why allow Loyalists and Bloodybacks to enjoy our figures or coloring?

I am wretched, and what is worse, I know it.

I am become more unhappy by the day, and less certain I understand why we have stayed in Setauket, or why we sent Bess to York City instead of taking our family and resettling in territory held by the Continentals.

So tend _my_ thoughts.

* * *

Before Papa returned, there was another letter to be read—though I am certain it was given me in error. The letter that Papa received from Michael's wife Amity in New Rochelle.

Papa must have been keeping it with Bess' letters to me, and in his hurry to leave for the village mistakenly handed it over as well.

I now know the reason for Papa's long detour home, though. Michael has left his family to go for a soldier. He has joined the Continentals. Amity writes to Papa for money. She is alone, with baby Malachi and another on the way. James is nearer her (than are we) in Norwalk, but still a goodly distance. She needs help, and has not heard from Michael in four months' time.

It is no surprise that Papa felt he must hazard a visit to New Rochelle.

* * *

Papa has returned home from the tavern. He looks years older than he did just an hour gone.

He arrived in time for the evening meal, but our family remained in the sitting room whilst the officers ate it, us having no stomach for it after the news Papa brought.

Reverend Tallmadge has been arrested.

* * *

He is charged with shooting Judge Woodhull, with intent to kill him. Also, I think, there were charges of sedition. Unlawful assembly, treason.

He is being held in the tavern cellar, with Lucas Brewster.

It feels to me as though the last few lines I have written in the dying light of the day are copied from an implausible novel. Surely they cannot be true, could not have come to pass here in Setauket among what I know are its goodly, decent citizenry.

It can be no coincidence, a Brewster and a Tallmadge, taken and charged by the Regulars. We are under attack as surely as were Major Hewlett's cannons on the hill aimed down, into the center of the village.

"Sally B.," Papa said, "I have received permission to furnish Master Lucas and the Reverend with meals. You and Cook may see to it. The sentries have been told to expect you." At a look from Mama he added, "DeJong refused to feed them unless the Army reimbursed his coffers for the labor and expense." He shook his head, "He is quite hot about them being held in his cellar."

"When?" asked Mama, though I was not certain what she asked—when should Sally B. take them food? When had he encountered Maarten DeJong?

"In two days' time," Papa answered, dragging his handkerchief across his brow. "The trial will be in two days' time."

* * *

There is no room for joy or happy anticipation tonight. If Mama has told Papa about the baby (and I do not know if she yet has), our hearts are too heavy to celebrate it. We talk instead, and turn over what has happened in the lowest possible tones, lest the officers overhear and assume we linger not in the sitting room visiting with our returned father, but sharing concern and dismay over the arrests, and they choose to charge us with sedition as well.

I do not care what anyone says. _I_ do not believe it. If Lucas Brewster was the last man on earth to arrest for poisoning Major Hewlett's horse, then the notion of Reverend Tallmadge shooting Richard Woodhull is equally nonsensical.

And equally contrived.

Both indicted by a man whom Corporal Eastin has announced—in this very house—is at hunting Brewsters and Tallmadges.

And now, now he has caught them.

* * *

And what room left, for joy or celebration, for anticipation in my life? Papa is returned. Bess has written. But those facts seem more and more like dry vestiges from an old life. A life Before.

I do not feel it is being dramatic to predict herein that I will not sleep this night. I will think on Carrie alone in her uncle's house, surrounded by her uncle's orchard, fearful of what shape her future (and his) will shortly take.

I will think on the Reverend in the tavern cellar; the most respected man in our village being housed like a rat.

I do not doubt his soul is right with the Creator, but I cannot bear the thought that you cannot be told of his plight. It is far too late for a letter. It seems as though it has long been too late for a letter, or words, or action to prevent what has occurred.

There has never been enough time here in Setauket. Not enough time for growing up, or courting, not enough time to understand the importance of liberty, of freedom from tyranny.

Not enough time to hope to see a certain stray dog again.

And now there is of a sudden less time, and I know whether I see your face again or not, whether we take up the many conversations we never seemed able to finish-as long as I live I will never again sleep easily if I cannot do something to help your father.


	19. Against Thy Neighbor Part IV - Encounter

Yesternight came to us all at the end of a long evening. What the officers had not et, Cook sat out for the family upon a cold plate, which we came to after long discussions cobbled together through silences in the sitting room. Silences that come from knowing how easily men staying in your own home may spy upon you, and may know whether your business be agreeable to His Majesty's soldiers or no.

Silences that I've yet to be fully adept at translating. I now think Outerbridges careful patriots, choosing where and when to rebel. Yet patriots that for all the world appear to the village (and the King's Men) as staunchest Tories.

Is it too late to mitigate that view for those who matter? Too late to ensure the right people know this truth?

Even Papa negotiating to have meals brought to Lucas Brewster and the Reverend will not be seen as an act anything more than merely Christian. As well he knows.

"I am astonished to arrive home to find the door to my office barred by strong iron, Wife," Papa had said, once we had commenced our cold supper.

"The door's lock was broken, Husband," Mama had replied, passing bread to Nan. "Jenny found it so."

"Was there aught missing?" Papa asked, and I well knew he had but shortly come from that room, and would have performed his own examination upon it, upon what it may now lack.

I looked at Papa across the table, as he looked to me for my answer.

And here it was that I decided to deal falsely with him. (I had certainly not chosen to do so even a moment earlier.) He would at this moment know the copy of the petition was absent from where he had worked to safely hide it. In the light of Reverend Tallmadge's arrest, I chose not to let him shoulder its burden again. Let him think it gone—retrieved, perhaps, by one of the men who had placed it in his keeping.

Let him be ignorant of its whereabouts, so that he might not need to lie to any King's Man who saw fit to question him upon it.

All he need be told was that it was not present when I searched his cache of papers.

All I needed to hope was that Sally B. (standing nearby to serve at table) might control her expression as I openly (and to her explicit knowledge) lied to my father.

"All that I might expect to be within was," I replied, "the small ledger safely in its place."

I said nothing of what I had learned within the small, encoded ledger.

There would then be no private conversation between Papa and I. No questions about the account he was keeping in code for Selah Strong, Sally B.'s not being in point of fact our property. No need for him to explain to me why he was in possession of a copy of the seditious petition.

As he had disguised what he was doing (possibly for our protection), so shall I disguise what I shall do. For his and Mama's protection. For the protection—hopefully—of all men co-signed upon that document.

Papa's face displayed a sort of hope and simultaneous disbelief upon my reply.

I willed myself not to look over toward Sally B.

But what say these actions about me, I am left to wonder. That I have become someone who might remove another's responsibility without their permission, without their being so informed?

That I am now a young woman who would lie to the very face of her father.

I cannot think that you would ever have done so, for all that you left without taking your leave of the Reverend, save in a letter delivered after the fact. For all that you must have packed and planned, keeping no one's counsel but your own.

But you are your own man.

There is no such vocabulary upon which I might style myself 'my own woman'. The very concept makes no sense.

Have I, along with courting, along with other such pleasures as keeping company with suitors-from which young Setauketers have largely been removed—have I put off my sex, as one might shed an outgrown garment?

Am I becoming something other?

Is this what war does? Propels us into roles we'd no particular interest in embodying? And denies us those we'd so long wished for? Sweetheart, wife, mother—beloved?

* * *

The night has passed.

But not comfortably. In addition to my own inability to fall into peaceful sleep, the Regulars were busy once the sun went down. Tumult was all about the village.

'Twas Second Lieutenant Simmons, the third billet here following Bess' absence (though by-far the quietest), who arrived home and shared the names with us of those men who had been charged and likewise locked up in the tavern cellar.

Ten men, all of whose names appear upon the petition copy unfolded now before me.

And yet I note the name (and presumably the person) of Walter Havens is not among them.

(Nor is Geordie Clemson, who has not been seen, but whose horse was found this morning saddled and prancing nervously about the stables—which he had somehow gotten free of, and whose condition we are told spoke of his being ridden some distance. And yet, his rider is missing.)

As I lay awake, unable to prevent myself from hearing the Regulars going about the village, knocking upon doors and taking people forcibly into custody—though I did not know for certain if it were the petition-declared Patriots, I _felt_ they were. Robeson had claimed they were the very league for which the Army was looking.

And I thought over what I had done to Papa by not telling him the copy rested securely (for the moment) with me.

Was he abed, awake and in fear that these arrests were made possible, these conspiring Patriots betrayed by a fault in his own safekeeping of the document copy? Was this a worry I had, in my decision, given him?

It would have been easy enough to find him, to set his mind at ease.

And yet I did not do so.

I kept to the bed I share with Sally B. and thought at such a pace and with such a passion I had no expectation of dropping off before dawn.

And yet I must have done, else the dream would not have come to me.

* * *

In the dream it was early evening, candles had just been lit in my old bed chamber. Bess was there with me, stitching with a needle and thread cloth about me. It seemed natural enough in the dream that she was doing so. I told myself, as I was lying upon my old bed, that her handiwork was that of a tarrying bag. And I was excited by the notion, expectant of my partner's arrival. (Though Outerbridges have never taken part in such a custom.)

Bess spoke words to me that I do not recall, but they prompted me to turn and look at the other side of the bed, away from her.

I thought I heard your voice in the hall, making your way toward the room. My heart fluttered. I looked toward the other space in the bed, believing happily you would soon occupy it.

Only to find it already filled. Filled by the rictus corpse of Selah Strong.

And then I knew that 'twas not a bundling bag Bess sewed upon, but a shroud.

The unmistakable shadow of your dragoon's fine helm fell upon the doorframe, and when I tried to rise I found myself within the shroud, Bess at sewing it shut about my eyes. My mouth, which tried to shout to warn you of your father's arrest made no sound, but sucked the shroud's fabric into it.

I could not speak to be heard, I could not rise.

Thus I awoke to the dawn; chilled, affrighted, painted with disappointment and frustration.

* * *

I shall waste no further space listing out my distractions and anxious disposition with regard to the arrests. Papa has learned (no doubt to his great relief) that Moses Payne delivered the original petition into Major Hewlett's hands, hoping, it would seem, to himself escape punishment.

A hard and ugly decision, that. To value one's own safety so far above that of others'.

And so the Regulars had the names and evidence they needed to conduct their raid of the village last night.

You may note the prior page has been torn from this volume. Fear not that any of the narrative has been expunged. Early this morning when I rose, I ripped it thus, wrote upon it the most succinct news, 'Lucas Brewster and Nathaniel Tallmadge arrested for attempted murder, held in tavern cellar' and took it out to the boathouse and its high, forgotten cabinet in hopes that a certain stray dog might, in his nosy wanderings, come upon it, and in so doing, carry news of it to you.

But just as I cannot squander time or ink upon my frantic state of mind, neither can I spend my energies upon concocting faith that this message will be found.

I have done what I can to send such a message, now I must look elsewhere for ways to prove useful.

* * *

There is much hammering today upon the hillside, the trial to commence tomorrow.

It is gallows, we are told, the supervisory work of Appleton, a name with which we became familiar during the gravestone fortifications of the church, and by noon its shape and cruel purpose could be of no doubt to anyone's mind. This Appleton is become an architect of particular cruelty.

Papa remarked that he had never before seen such a large one.

I think they mean to hang them to a man.

Standing in the stocks, Moses Payne has had to watch every step of its crafting.

Walter Havens remains unaccounted for.

Geordie Clemson's body was located out near Crane Neck Point, nearby where Havens kept his boat (which is also said to be missing). Mr. Clemson had been shot, if not dead, then to the point of dying upon the road in the bullets' aftermath.

So, two less men to hang than His Majesty would like.

* * *

In the afternoon, when the gallows and the arrests had already become well-traveled jokes among the soldiery (I overheard such jests often as I walked into the village, never far, as usual, from being amongst the King's Men), I managed to leave the house on the heels of Sally B. who was carrying a meal to those held in the tavern cellar, as Papa had arranged.

When she realized I was following her she called me out. "You best go home, Miss Jenny—jail ain't no place for a young lady!"

"You'd best mind who you tell what to do—and do as you're told!" I sniped back.

Here she stopped walking, and turned herself toward me (we were not yet in view of the tavern). "Way I see it, ain't gotta do nothin' I'm tole. I's free, Jenny Outerbridge. All I's doin' is waitin' for me a ride to York City."

" _This_ is how you take the news that you've been but hired out to Papa?"  
"Crown done put attainder on Selah Strong afore he died. He don't own me no more. Your Papa can put all the coin he wants to in that dead man's account for my hiring-out, but he should be paying it to me. _I_ needs that money to find 'Lijah."

I started toward her, to further close the gap between us, but she began to walk on, briskly approaching the guards at the cellar doors. Perhaps to try and call my bluff—that I wouldn't follow her and risk engaging those sentries.

"Food, Sir," she said, and they must have recognized her from earlier in the day, as one walked toward the doors and worked to open them for her and her basket.

I tried to devise a quick plan of how to also be let in, but nothing came to mind, and shortly Sally B. disappeared down the dark cellar steps, alone.

I did not have time to be much gloomy, though, as I heard a disturbance arise not afar off.

It was Second Lieutenant Simmons (whom I had not known was tasked nearby this location), and he was speaking in firm, but growing ever louder, tones to a woman in a cloak. "Miss, you have been told. _You have been TOLD_. There will be no admission for you to see the prisoner."

The Miss' voice was too quiet to hear it properly across the distance, but I saw her hand go up to reach for her cloak's hood, falling back from her face consequent her animated pleas to Simmons. There was a tremor in her hand, most pronounced.

It was Carrie Brewster.

I walked with purpose (and what I hoped appeared more of authority than anxiousness) toward the two. Carrie drew back, but did not leave.

Simmons began to look out into that middle distance to which the officers seemed to have been trained to resort as a way of ending unpleasantness with colonials and villagers. (And palsy-stricken nieces frantic about their palsy-stricken uncles being held in damp, sunless cellars.)

I nodded toward Simmons' direction, though did not keep my eyes upon him long enough to determine whether he marked my appearance on the scene.

"Carrie!" I said. "You have come to town! How good it is to see you!" how vapid my voice must have sounded. As though she had arrived for nothing of greater import than to buy a length of ribbon for a hat.

She turned toward me, her eyes bleary and more than a little like a dog's when too-oft kicked.

"Miss Jenny—" she said, but I took her hand and pulled it through my arm and walked off—before she could protest—away from the cellar entrance and toward the water. Away from where Simmons might overhear us, away from drawing any further attention to her.

"You are well enough?" I asked.

"I—yes, but I have _had_ my medicine. Uncle has not had his in days."

"…and the trial to begin," I finished for her, in the interest of expedience.

"He would not wish to plead his case—to appear in public-without the tempering qualities of his elixir," she explained.

"Nor should he have to," I said. "Plead his case at all—much less when compromised by his malady. What have you for him?"

She pulled aside the cloth upon her basket and showed me a stoppered glass bottle of mottled dark amber.

"Knows he how much of it to use?"

She nodded.

"I need your basket," I said.

"What plan you to do with it?" she asked, her delicate features puckering as she tried to follow my line of thought.

"I will get this to your uncle," I told her. "I give you my word."

She gave a little gasp. "But the Lieut—"

" _Simmons_ ," I prompted her. "His billet is in our home."

"What if you are caught?"

"It's a bad time to be a Brewster—or a Tallmadge," I told her (I should perhaps have explained myself better), "but it is an excellent time to be an Outerbridge."

I felt the tremble of her hand inside the crook of my elbow where it lay. "You must go home, Carrie," I said. "Without looking back. I will do as I say. You, must pray. Pray that help will find its way here, for your uncle—for the Reverend, for them all."

I stepped briskly out of her grip (it seemed a good idea not to allow myself in that moment to dwell too long upon her easily-understandable misery) and toward the underling soldiers tasked with that shift's guard of the cellar door, and called up a displeased look to my countenance.

"That lazy girl?" I said, with a huff that (purposefully) knocked back the hood to my cloak, and showed the coiffure 'that lazy girl' had given me that morning. "She's forgot the rest of her load!"

The two soldiers sniggered.

"'Tis a sorry day," I told them, "when a mistress is at doing her own slave's work!" I let my hips dip just enough that my petticoats gave something of a swing. The corner of Carrie's basket was visible under my cloak, but not enough to reveal to anyone sharp-eyed that it was the self-same.

The soldier closest to the door grinned with what teeth were left in his head (there were not many) and beckoned to me, "c'mon then," and unlocked the door to where Sally B. and the prisoners were within.

"I'll leave this open, Miss," he said, "in case of any trouble for you."

"You are too kind," I told him, "but don't mind her wailing when I slap her good for making me come all the way down here."

What nasty subterfuge it was, smiling and simpering as though I were Rachel Clark's less-polished sister.

* * *

The cellar was dark, but in the interest of a fair report, I shall not overly characterize it herein as more sinister than it was. It was a tavern cellar; large, and certainly more well-lit than the cellars of most homes. It smelt of straw, of malt, of barley and ageing wood.

Anna Strong's store-keeping Mama would have lauded. The space was neat as a pin (as cellars go).

I could hear Sally B. further in with the prisoners, setting up the meal she had brought upon the tops of barrelheads. (Once she had set it all out, presumably the guards would come and release the men's hands so they might eat it under close guard. The cellar interior was absent any guards at present, King's Men preferring to stand guard within the light of day, rather than the mustiness of cellar.)

In the foreground I could easily make out the two men I had come to see.

Lucas Brewster's frail body hung from his shackled wrists, which periodically shook so violently his chains rattled like those of some haunting spectre.

I hurried forward toward him, pulling the bottle from Carrie's basket without attempting to explain my appearance there, nor exchanging what pleasantries one might within an improvised gaol.

"I've no spoon or cup!" I bemoaned aloud upon realizing the fact. "Can you mete out the correct draught?"

I believe he nodded. He trembled so it was difficult to be certain. I uncorked the bottle and held it near his lips at a tilt.

I held it up so until he grunted. I had no expectation of how long such an elixir might take to work, and had asked no such information of Carrie.

"Carrie has come," I told him—at a loss of what to do with myself now the medicine had been delivered (no matter my earlier singlemindedness about gaining admission to the captives). "The guards will not give her leave to see you."

Perhaps he trembled some less after his dosing, perhaps he was able to find a breath of peace clinging to the hope for what relief this medicine might afford him. He tried to speak in reply to me, but a wheeze was all his throat produced. In the half-light where he was strung up, I could not read his expression, beyond that of untenable misery.

"Child," the larger man beside him—undeniably the voice of Reverend Tallmadge—said to me, "you must not come here," his voice was mellifluous, but tempered by concern, unlike his contemptuous speech given the day prior as he surrendered his rifle.

"Leave the bottle hidden. Come, this barrel, not too far from me; lie it atop and I shall get it for him at what times we are released from our bonds for meals and our rare constitutionals. Hurry now, you must _leave_ the medicine—and you must not scheme to come here again. These are dangerously uncertain times for decent-minded people."

Despite Lucas Brewster's feeble form so near to me, his labored breathing, I could not take my eyes from the Reverend as he addressed his words to me. Perhaps it was the training of long years in how to behave during his Sunday sermons, perhaps it was still that old belief within me that solutions to any problem spiritual or secular, lay within his learned mind. Perhaps it was merely that I wished to refresh myself upon which points exactly you most resembled him.

What I noticed was that, as always, his coat and waistcoat were tailored quite finely. Tailored in the way a man who took no hard labor upon himself might request. When stretching for a needed book upon a high shelf is all the range of motion one might require in one's everyday clothes.

It was not a suit of clothes meant for a man whose arms must be overextended above the level of his head, doubly bound by shackles _and_ rope, and as such, the Reverend's buttoned waistcoat was causing him rather a lot of difficulty when breathing where it strained across his hearty chest.

Obediently, I placed the bottle of Carrie's elixir as he requested, upon a nearby barrel where the light and its unremarkable appearance might serve to conceal it. And I moved closer to him.

Further into the cellar, the noises of Sally B's work grew slighter, and further apart. She was soon to be finished.

"Let me help you, Reverend," I said, and began to loosen the buttons upon his waistcoat. His relief was sure to be immediate, but the task was not a simple one, with the strain his enforced posture placed upon those closures.

In this new proximity, he was perhaps better able to apprehend my face. "But, you are the girl—" he began, recognition coming across his face in waves, and I assume he meant to denote I was the girl who had run away from him so shamefully that Sunday those weeks ago. "You are Malachi Outerbridge's daughter. You—"

"Jenny," I said.

"Yes," and I do not think I imagined his voice catching. "Little Jenny—I, I know. You and Samuel—"

I shook my head. His recognition of who I was no longer mattered to me. "I am here to say I mean to get word to your son that you are being held here. Take heart. All is not yet lost."

"My son?" he asked, his brow puzzled. "Samuel can help no one, not even himself. I am told his is become captured, and imprisoned."

"Not Samuel," I said, and my own breath broke a little upon the name of my former schoolmate. " _Benjamin_. I shall get word to _Benjamin_ of your plight, of this wrongful imprisonment."

I undid the last waistcoat button; his lungs were free.

He took an involuntary deep breath. "Benjamin," he said. "But I don't even—" he began to protest. "Child, what are you about?"

I had no further words prepared for him (not that what I did say had been truly prepared—anymore than had my Providential encounter with him in this cellar). I wanted to be able to answer him in a way that would prove my proficiency to my declared task, but before I could speak further, Sally B.'s face appeared between us.

"Miss, we goin'," she said, and I would have given her a stern talking to with regard to telling _her mistress_ when _she_ will be taking her leave, had the cellar doors not parted and a guard descended, ready to unshackle the men one by one so they might eat the meal brought them.

With the presence of King's Men, nothing more of any import might be said, no private words exchanged. I simply gave a short (but hopefully determined) nod to the Reverend, and walked up and out with Carrie Brewster's empty basket over my wrist, and Sally B. at my side.

I do not think it likely I will gain a second entrance to see the prisoners without garnering more attention than would be prudent. Certainly I do not wish Mama and Papa to learn I visited them so.

To my great dismay, the note I had placed earlier about Lucas and Reverend Tallmadge's fates remains in place yet, untouched, unread, its contents unknown.

I am home now, evening is well upon us, Sally B. shall arrive to bed ere long, and I am resolved that the whole of this diary shall be placed within the boathouse cabinet (abjuring even the oilskin cover so as not to truly conceal it). The petition copy I shall include within it. In this way, should things turn out for the worst, the names of these men loyal to the Patriot cause shall be known, even as their murders may be announced. This I shall do, and I shall pray for all I am worth that it be found by a certain stray dog before it be too late.

It is so late, Benjamin. So very, very late.


	20. Against V-I Do Not Mean to Fail

I report that my diary remains in its place, lodged therein with my fervent prayers for its discovery by a friendly hand. (And the petition copy along with it.)

Even so, I have torn what blank pages of it I might, so there may be someplace to carry on this narrative insofar as this narrative continues to unfold.

* * *

It was only this morning, as we sat breaking our fast with no particular plans (as a family for the coming day), that Mama abruptly joined us, dressed in her cloak for going out, as if to church.

We each of us looked up from our plates, astonished at her ready-to-go-calling appearance at such an hour.

"Mistress Outerbridge," Papa asked, after some period of silence, during which he finished slowly chewing his ham. "Where might you be bound this morn?"

And then I knew what Mama would answer (though I did not understand it, though I would not have imagined it possible in long years).

"We shall attend upon this trial," Mama said. "All of us."

Papa's brow cocked. "But do you think that wise?"

Mama's face had a look about it we have each of us seen at one time or another. A look of compassionate matter-of-factness after which she could not be naysaid. "We shall not let our neighbors look out upon those present and see no friendly faces."

Without replying, Papa brought his napkin to his face, signaling that his breakfast was complete, and went straightaway to freshen his cravat.

I did not interrupt and remind Mama that she had declared previously that she would never again enter Reverend Tallmadge's former church.

I did not hurry to catch Papa and ask for him to explain why suddenly Outerbridges, staunchest Loyalists, second—if not first—among Setauket Tories, were undisturbed with showing public concern for their imprisoned neighbors accused of treason, murder, and accused of having put their names to a rebellious and seditious document.

What I have (I think) of late discovered about my family (much if not all of it recounted within my prior diary pages) is not that Outerbridges are outright Patriots. For they would never be comfortable with such a term (or not at least for many years to come). And less, still, would they feel at home espousing the cause of any liberty earned through rebellion and war.

No, Outerbridges see themselves as Setauketers through and through. When Papa had been asked to safeguard a document signed by men of Setauket, he did so—though he did not sign it himself. He kept the name and account of Setauket's own Selah Strong current and profitable, and safe from attainder, hidden within his ledgers.

When the King's Men arrived ostensibly to protect and serve Setauket's safety and guard its port of commerce, Outerbridges complied.

Mama and Papa might feel it a bridge too far to consider themselves Americans, supporters of the Continental Army, _Patriots_ , but they are more than colonists, more than British as were Papa's people. No, they are Setauketers.

And the more the King and his minions soldiering here hurt and target our neighbors, the closer Mama and Papa shall come to their own crisis of rebellion.

To taking on that badge of Patriot.

And so, Benjamin, we Outerbridges shall attend the trial. I shall see Lucas Brewster and your Reverend father again. And though it has been desecrated as a horse barn, I shall be in a church, our beloved church, which can do nothing if not embolden my prayers for your Providential appearance, and their rescue.

* * *

Excuse my hurried hand. I have quit the trial before it adjourned, and I've but a moment to write herein. Perhaps someday I might have means and leisure to recount what else has passed beyond this: I shall depart Setauket before the hour is out, Sally B. companioning me.

I have sent her to Carrie Brewster's stable, for we must have horses if we intend to travel at any speed of pace, or I to pass scrutiny as a woman of any means.

She balked at horse theft, to be sure (though in days to come, such an action might be less shocking than what else we encounter, or find a necessity in the doing of). I worked to assure her that Carrie alone has no need of every horse in her uncle's stable, and were we to accomplish the task I mean to take on, she shall bless rather than curse us upon our return.

Sally B. is to take the horses and wait with them outside the village for my arrival. I was sure to remind her not to pick one too grand for her own, as doing so would only call unnecessary attention to us among any travelers and soldiers we shall meet.

* * *

I have written upon two of these loose leaves, letters for taking my leave. The first I shall place upon the dining table for Mama and Papa to find when they return.

" _Dear family,_

 _I write this note of farewell for the present, as James has come to take Sally B. and I to Amity, who has great need of helping hands in her present delicate condition._

 _I thank you, Papa, for arranging things so expertly that little care had to be taken on mine or Amity's part to plan for this journey._

 _I pray for your continued good health throughout my time away, that the children will do their best to keep to their studies, and that I might be returned to you still,_

 _Your loving daughter,_

 _Jenny_ "

* * *

A second letter, not meant for others' eyes, I shall place within Papa's secret compartment in his study. I have no doubt he shall look therein upon receipt of the first letter, as that communication is predicated upon a lie he, too, must now perpetuate in order to protect Sally B's and my flight from the British and the countryside they occupy. And in searching that most clandestine space, Papa shall note as well the absence of coin among his notes, in the amount as is necessary for a journey of any length and duration.

" _Papa,_

 _I am sorry for you to have to learn that your daughter is not the obedient child you thought her (mostly) to be. I confess herein that I am a liar, and now, having stolen coin from you, a thief. I have absconded, also, with your small, pearl-handled pistol._

 _I shall not say herein where we are bound, but I do expect that at some point it is entirely possible we might yet make our way to Amity._

 _I am sorry, truly, to have to leave Mama with the education of the children, and the care of the new baby, preparations for its arrival. In happier times I believe I could have been content with such tasks. And I dare to hope that I might, someday, be so again._

 _You must believe me, though, that my journey away from you is not consequent of any occurrence within our family. Rather, I love you all as dearly as did I the day I was born into our happy home, and I pray for a time when we may re-unite and I may tell you such things without reservation._

 _Please make excuses for my not of writing (in my coming absence) to Bess. It will be best, I am resolved, if she learns news of my leaving Setauket as tardily as possible._

 _It would be imprudent to place into words the reason behind my flight. You must trust that in my judgment it is important enough to brave the risks of such an endeavor._

 _And you must at all costs, as you know, adhere to the tale that I am but traveled to Amity's aid._

 _I do not say I leave my heart with you all, for I am grown a woman now, and where I go I take my heart with me—and pursue my heart's bidding in my appointed task-but I pray you, doubt not my lasting tender feelings and ties to you all._

 _Your daughter,_

 _Jenny_ "

* * *

These final pages I shall momentarily carry out to join their brothers (sadly, still present) in the boathouse cabinet. Not that they are of any broader interest or consequence, not that they carry any useable military information-only I have not the presence of mind to decide upon any other fate for them, than to rest within the volume from which they were originally torn.

It is in this final act I take my leave of Setauket and flee, determined to find aid for the men now captive in their own church.

In this act I take back the responsibility of my own self-determination. In this act I forever brand myself a Patriot, a rebel, a willful enemy of the King and his illegal and immoral rule of my country.

In this act, I risk everything Providence has ever gifted me; my place in a loving family, my status within an admirable, upright village, my reputation as a virtuous unmarried girl, unto even my very life.

I do so with no doubt that my chosen course of action is right, and best.

I do not mean to fail.


	21. The Battle of Setauket - A Terrible Mess

I begin this new volume, writing upon the clerk's standing desk in Papa's office. The slant of the wood surface as my pages face away from the public door (once again open and inviting business) lends privacy to my words, as does the covering sheet of figures I have been given to sum up. I must only take best of care not to slide the sheet too quickly over my yet-drying ink in hopes of it masking my true task.

The village is very much alive with news and gossip; half-triumphant, half in horror, following the events of but a sennight ago.

Neither ball nor grand occasion could have so invigorated all sides. (And indeed, in my recollection never before has.) Patriots and Tories-those who but wish to live unaccosted without regard to who rules this country; all have a tale to share with neighbors, shocking developments to report and hours of speculation to weigh in upon.

As a village we are all (at least for the present moment) not only speaking to one another with no respect to another's present political positions—we are seeking one another out. Shops and tradesmen are flooded with bright-eyed customers, showing up to socialize as much as to contract business.

Papa declares if Comfort Tiffen, best among the village's weavers, is not careful, she will be operating an ad hoc tea room alongside her loom and wheel.

But it is a frenetic energy, brought about by an unexpected stirring of the humours, and whilst we cannot expect it to long endure, the events that have precipitated it we need not fear will be forgotten.

Certainly I shall not forget my own journey back to my Outerbridge family and home here in Setauket.

Of necessity, in the prior volume of this diary, I was unable to relate with any specificity the events both external and interior that led to my and Sally B.'s flight into the Setauket woods, toward the coast with two horses taken from Carrie Brewster's stable in search of blue coats, and the eldest son of our Reverend Tallmadge.

And so herein I shall now do.

As Setauketers, Mama had decided for our family that there was no other proper action but to attend the joint trial of Lucas Brewster, Reverend Tallmadge (Nathaniel as is his Christian name), and the other men whose names were found scriven upon the petition to elect Setauket's Selah Strong to the New York Congress (lest there be no friendly faces looking-on at the military proceedings).

My own mind wished strongly to be present, though I found also myself torn with worry over this diary's original volume being still lodged in our boathouse, important news within it (it not having been discovered by friendly hands), and no other way having presented itself to me overnight to get word of the direness of this situation to the Patriot encampment that can clear-enough be spied occupying the shore just across the water.

Oh, if I but knew enough forest-craft to send a signal in smoke, had flags with which to gesture in a manner to be understood, or unnatural, unworldly power enough to guide a bottle across the water with a message sealed into it.

Or, had I had but the presence of mind-when warning Walter Havens to flee the village-to add the caveat that he ought seek you out, bid home with all haste.

But I had not such level-headedness to my credit in those stolen moments.

I attired myself for the trial day somberly, but made certain my hair was dressed as charmingly as could be mustered; even condemned men no doubt wish to have something pleasant fall into their gaze. And yet I found no joy in the process, nor in the effect of the outcome.

I was not certain I could affect a sanguine expression as I sat opposite men most certainly set to hang within hours, knowing that what I had taken care to affect had not reached even its first point of contact, but lay bound up as tightly as the pages upon which it was written, coldly waiting in the shade and damp of our unvisited boathouse.

We took none but Abner along with us, hopeful that he would bridle his twelve-year-old tongue and behavior.

Our journey up the hillside to Major Hewlett's improvised courtroom was sobering. The day was clear, and the scaffold that had grown up overnight seemed to cast shadows far longer than Nature might grant it.

Moses Payne stood, clapped into the stocks, wherein he had well-earned a place by his actions in surrendering the original of the now-notorious petition.

If one wished to tread slowly and with dignity toward the outline of what had once been Reverend Tallmadge's church upon the hill, one's wish to be well-past Moses and his on-going punishment increased one's pace, at least insofar as by-passing that unpleasant sight.

The church itself is hardly describable to those who once cherished its modest but loved timbers, its high windows providing much light, and when open, welcome breeze. Major Hewlett's soldiers had carried in some six our more of our pews (which most days are littered out-of-doors upon the grounds surrounding what the bloodybacks name their barracks). One shuddered to think what evils have been thought of and perhaps even wrought upon them, as we moved to seat ourselves among the other Setauketers assembled.

There were fewer present than would have attended one of the Reverend's sermons, though some number did stand as space in the pews ran short.

Abraham Woodhull, we are informed, shall stand as magistrate in the Judge's place, though he be not able to boast of accomplishing his complete education, and Major Hewlett will rule over the proceedings—this being, it would seem, a military matter.

None of which makes sense. The Major to preside over a trial of treasonists, yes. But a common farmer to argue the case against them? One glance to Papa, and he could not conceal his dissatisfaction (at least to my eye) over such unconcealed partiality. And as for the case of Lucas Brewster—charged with attempting to murder the Major (and slaying the Major's horse instead)? How could Hewlett possibly rule without prejudice in that matter?

How, then (one thinks each spectator _must_ be asking) can Abraham-of all people-guide this court's claims against Reverend Tallmadge, the man accused of trying to shoot Abraham's own father dead, with any fairness?

But what more could one expect of a military matter of murder and treason being tried in a desecrated church where not a fortnight gone a horse died, and now a group of men who once worshipped here, praising God and striving to do His work, now stand shackled, unkempt, and without intervention most likely dead following tomorrow's dawn?

But this, even this, was nothing to the unimaginable idea that 'twas your best friend since childhood shortly set to insert himself into the architecture of your father's death by hanging.

This will not happen, I told myself—ignoring the memory of my diary—my claxon call for aid—and its becoming-permanent place in the boat house. Rescue will arrive. Abraham will not go along with this immoral folly.

Angels, their very selves, will descend to prevent this fractured forum of justice from going forward.

This will not happen.

Abraham Woodhull, as I know him—the Abe of the past—would not blacken his soul by condemning Nathaniel Tallmadge to such a fate.

This will not happen.

And yet, an hour later, and half the accused had stood and had the charges read, that of their signatures upon the document Moses Payne surrendered.

Their signatures all being well-known to Maarten DeJong, his merchant business robust, his trade widely used by all of Setauket. He alone was called to testify to their hands.

I found myself relieved (though I had not thought to worry of it prior) that Papa was not similarly called to aid in the condemnation of his neighbors and associates, and find himself forced to betray them in such a way.

Even so, the sweat on his wrists and palms took all starch out of his cuffs.

Thom Brown's name was called, and Abraham began going through much the same rhetoric as he had with the others. Thom is younger than Abraham—nearer to my age than his. And one of the few young men unmarried and not soldiering left in Setauket (though it is considered by all that he will marry Precious Becken when his fortunes allow).

"I should have left here when King George's men arrived," Thom said, his voice sounding of defeat.

"To save yourself from a day such as this?" Abe asked, his brow still furrowed from the moment his part in this trial began.

Thom's face snapped to life. "To save _you_ —to save all of you from a day such as this arriving." He threw his arm out toward the trial clerk who held the petition. "I should have joined the Continentals within the hour of signing that petition. But my heart was here. It has always been here, in Setauket, with my neighbors, my family—my church." Here he looked at Reverend Tallmadge, who shared a kindly look in return. "I believed it was here my time and efforts would be best spent."

"And yet _you_ were wrong, Thom Brown," said Abraham, in a tone not at all sympathetic, but rather, rude and impatient. "What could you offer Setauket, but your betrayal of all your village holds dear? Loyalty, dependability—peace and goodness?"

Among those watching, a murmur rose. Thom Brown's role in the village as an upright neighbor always willing to aid another, a hardy worker with a strong back, and a generous citizen—had never been called into doubt before.

Thom shook his head, deliberately and slow. From my place I could see his anger grow into his own impatience. "I see now that I was wrong. I do not deny that is my signature. I stand here and own it, own the action I took that day in agreeing to appoint what I now see was one of our last goodly, decent men to a post in which he could work to throw off an unjust and oppressive government—and save Setauket-save all of you! I own _that_." His gaze upon Abraham was heated in its steady constancy. "But as I stand, this day, I _dis_ own you all."

The watching crowd now grew properly noisy with unease at his damning words, his condemnation of them. Major Hewlett's frown line increased, and as he called for order he announced a momentary recess. None of us in attendance had eaten since the early morning (nor had he).

One hour, he said, and court would reconvene. The review of Thom Brown's treason would not be revisited, he ruled. The court would move on to the final two signed to the petition, and then to Lucas and the Reverend.

As the spectators moved to disperse, I found myself shaken by Abraham's systematic handling of the accusations of the petition signatories. As he prosecuted them there was nothing in him that I could find that recognized any familiarity among these men, this neighbors. Yes, many of them would have had angry words for his father the magistrate, and the Judge's Tory-ways. Many would have had their wives' tongues—or even their own—at wagging about Abraham and Anna Strong—about how often Mary Woodhull and his son were left alone, seen alone; neglected.

Abraham was tenacious as a hound half-starved and oft-kicked. Were he on a leash (held in Hewlett's hand) more than once he appeared to be straining at it, baying for blood.

I began to believe that Abraham had come to see them—the men accused-all as his personal enemies—to see himself as abandoned by his village, his home; ostracized and alone. It seemed clear to me the man Abraham Woodhull had become might well _be_ a man who believed Reverend Tallmadge shot to kill his father, who believed that ailing Lucas Brewster plotted to poison Major Hewlett unto death.

I felt chilled with such convincing. When I closed my eyes I could see nothing but the silhouette of the new scaffold against the dull Setauket sky.

I walked down the hillside toward home trying not to look up from where my bent head showed me only the safe, occasional view of the toes of my shoes. In doing this I lost my place beside Mama and Papa as they, too, traveled home, and my journey became solitary, my thoughts ran wild and unchecked with apprehension and jittery fear.

Our midday victuals were as chilly as we were solemn. Cook had not known to prepare us much in the way of a luncheon. The bread was day-old, the meat unwarmed. Our military boarders took their meal among the soldiery, all of those seeming, for this day, to be concentrated around their barracks church. The King's Men's spirits were high, celebratory—as in a victory soon to be declared.

In their absence, rare as it was, we Outerbridges would have usually rallied, our home once again briefly our own. But not this day. We ate our repast as one might a funeral supper.

Afterward Mama and Papa (Abner at their heels lest he be told to stay behind) left again to journey back to the court. I was set to follow them directly, after a trip to our pail closet, when as I was crossing our backyard, I spotted Sally B. and noted that she was behaving in the odd way of a person making a deliberate effort to look as though they were not about to set out upon a journey.

It was abundantly clear she was struck by finding me still about and not having gone along with the others.

"You ain't up to the Court, Miss Jenny?" she asked, though as I stood before her, it was obvious I was not.

I asked her what she was up to, and her eyes narrowed at me, and then widened as she seemed to have made a decision.

"I's gone," she told me. "Goin' today, and ain't nobody here gonna stop me. I's for York City, and findin' 'Lijah."

I took a moment to consider this news. (Not at all my usual way of conversing with Sally B.) A thought occurred to me. "And anyone who could stop you is occupied just now up in the soldiers' barracks?"

She did not vocally agree or confess, but her plan was sound, if not seaworthy. Anyone of consequence in our lives was indeed up at the court proceedings. It was just the right time to make such an abscond. One could not plan (or hope) for a better moment.

"You are being foolish," I heard myself tell her. "Once you are away from Setauket, what do you think will be thought of you, alone, on the way to York City? How might you protect yourself from what you may come upon in the forest? Or unscrupulous travelers on the road? The minute you walk away from here you become no one to anyone. If you do not serve Outerbridges—or Strongs—who will care for you? What will you be? _Have_ you monies?" I asked hurriedly. "Or do you intend to resort to highway robbery?"

Her expression had flared into anger at my taunt.

"'Lijah's sister," she told me. "Myself. Is I so different in your mind from you? What do _you_ become if _you_ leave Setauket? If you haven't Outerbridges or Belards to fall back on? We've shared a life and a bed, Miss Jenny. We both missin' folk what aren't here anymore. Maybe we ain't so different as you think."

The folk I was missing (to her mind) I can only assume she meant to be Bess. Surely she cannot have apprehended more, no matter our time in such close quarters.

I had of certain not given any mind to thinking of leaving Setauket, much less attempting to do so alone, but the day's shocks of seeing good men brought low—even so low as to that new scaffold—of seeing Abraham Woodhull, whom I had long-believed to be a good man-had taken something of caution out of me, and made even the name Setauket taste sharp with vinegar.

"Go to Carrie Brewster's," I told her, despite her declaration that she was through taking commands from Outerbridges, or anyone. "Saddle and take two horses—without speaking to anyone. Bring them to the Horst Wood just outside of the village."

"An' why would I do that?"

"Because _I_ have money," I told her, suddenly impatient. " _And_ a pistol. And because you can travel unquestioned with your mistress."

"Mistress?" her nose pinched with her dislike of that term in association with me, and not Mama. (Or, perhaps at this point for her—in association with anyone.)

"Yes, you had best remember to call me that." A thought struck. "And I should be a widow. Gemma Crain. No one local is of that surname, and we will therefore easily avoid any questions of relation."

Sally B. looked perplexed at my words, but I did not let her stand longer than a moment contemplating them. _That_ she could do on the walk to and back from Lucas Brewster's farm.

Perhaps I should have waited for her to agree to my altering of her original plan, but as mine was a superior stratagem in all regards, I only shooed her off to the task assigned.

Myself, I tried not to examine too closely the many ways in which this action of mine might backfire, and hurried upstairs to throw what little I might into Papa's saddlebag before I would need to meet her in the wood.

I packed in haste, and wrote my two farewell letters, raided Papa's safe place of coin, and left with the wind to my face, and my fear (of what was shortly to come were it not mitigated) alone stopping me from turning back.

I could no longer wait for help to come to us. I must go out and seek it, however dangerous and fraught the journey carrying the news to you might prove.

* * *

My plan, while outstanding in its overall aspects, lacked finesse in its deployment. _How could I possibly manage a proper toilet whilst bivouacking in the woods?_ A proper toilet necessary to convince those we encountered on the roads that I _was_ a well-to-do young widow, traveling with my slave girl? We had no passes, no papers of any kind.

I had the money I took from Papa's office. I had the pearl-handled pistol (which Major Hewlett had turned away from his commandeering of all firearms), and in a small bag, what was needed for several shots.

I had not been able to take much in the way of foodstuffs (Cook and the Kitchen Girl not having left home) without raising suspicion.

We would surely spend more than several hungry hours together, chilly and uncomfortable in the woods where no inns might be found, and homes might unknowingly shelter those opposing my self-assigned mission.

When Sally B. would question the direction I took for our horses, I knew I must have some excuse or explanation ready; that I was aiming us not at all for York City and the King's Army and her brother there, but toward the coast roads, and then the coast itself, hugging it in the hopes of spying a Continental boat, or civilian in the London Trade who might ferry us across into General Washington's territory with camps of Continentals that would know the name Ben Tallmadge.

How close the opposite shore would look, save when one thought about what it might take to truly cross over to it!

* * *

Locating Sally B. in Horst Wood proved no accomplishment at all. The horses were far from quiet, and her own ill-ease at being in charge of two of them made for no small amount of noise.

I was covered in burrs, my dress near picked apart in places by the time we found a spot to shelter for the night. I had no looking glass, but seeing Sally B's bedraggled appearance, I could not in good logic expect much better of my own.

I had taken one of Mama's caps to wear—I was to be a widow, after all-and was thankful for the covering. At least my hair remained untangled, and free of leaves and twigs. It was a slight comfort.

We lay close beside each other upon the ground—in the way we had become accustomed to sleeping in the shared bedroom.

I was unsatisfied that we had not been able to travel further along the coast before having to stop, for it was a night with only intermittent moonshine, and what stood for a road not as familiar to my eye as might be had I ridden it with any frequency.

We were no great distance yet away from Setauket.

Sally B. appeared to drop off without delay, but my journey to sleep proved not so effortless. I went over what little I had for a plan.

I thought on the letters, both public and private, I had left at home for my family to find. I thought of just going, as I had said I was, on to Amity, and the safety of her home. Her home, without such tight control of the King's Men. Her home, where I would not have to pass scaffolds and hear of good men I knew hanged. Of Amity's and an attempt at forgetting. This I could do.

But even as I pondered on it, I knew it was a daydream. There would be no 'new start' for me. I had put myself willingly into a dangerous situation. And for good reason. Naught remained but to see it to its end.

Strangely, it did not occur to me that anyone would come after us. I expected Mama and Papa to be horrified at my letters, but not to attempt to pursue me. I do not know why I held such little faith in their desire to recover me, and yet I did.

Perhaps I simply understood the strength of my own determination, and assumed they also would see I was not to be deterred or detained.

I did not fret that bloodybacks would be looking for or find us in the wood. I assumed (and quite rightly) that all eyes were on the court's outcome. I also assumed (as had we all at the moment I left) every man in irons was to be hanged following Major Hewlett's standard day-long assessment of the concluded trial. Therefore, I had the day to come to get a message to you, for any hanging would come at the second dawning following my flight.

And still I could not sleep. Upon the discomfort of the root-filled forest floor, I told myself stories of you, a soldier often bivouacked under the stars, determined to discharge your duty to all of us. To America, to Setauket and those whom you loved best.

It was to these impassioned imaginings I finally dropped off.

* * *

There was little of passion come dawn. The ground in the wood was wetter than we'd either expected, and thus so were we. I grabbed the cap from my head with the realization, and flung what damp there was upon it off before re-settling it on my head.

The best that could be done for our clothes was to brush them off with our hands.

I had not expected re-saddling the horses to take as long as it did—though Sally B. informed me that _she_ had no such illusions after having saddled both the day before at the Brewster farm before she took them.

We'd made no fire the night before, and kindled none now. We each took a small amount of what food I had brought, and chewed the old bread and cold meat in the hopes it would not choke us, our water skins being far less full than I would have expected.

I did my utmost to hurry us along, we needed to get back on the coast road and be on the look-out for a way to cross to the opposite shore.

If only I knew where there might be a fisherman's boat! I would have scarred my hands gladly for a chance to row us across, and a sound possibility of finding someone to carry our news to you.

* * *

I was trying to talk myself out of a feeling of defeat before we had even begun, when in the distance a sound so unexpected and unusual—yet arriving with great, undeniable force—met both our ears.

It was as loud as if we were standing in the center of a thunderclap. But louder, I think. The ground gave a tremble. It was like a musket shot—if it were to go off in your own head.

Sally B.'s immediate reaction was to set off running—queerly pulling the reins on her horse while she remained on foot. She ran in the direction I had us aimed in, toward the coast road, and (what she thought was) York City and Elijah beyond. 'Twas her horse with the food and small provisions saddle bag. She must have feared the noise in some way concerned our absence. That it heralded some force arriving to return us home, perhaps to punishment. I did not think to call after her.

The noise and trembling ground threw anything resembling processed thought out of my mind. I could only think it had come from Setauket—from home.

I could think only of Outerbridges. Were they safe? _Were Hewlett and his men taking a terrible revenge upon the entire town? Wiping it and its citizens from the face of the colonies?_

As I write this now, my fearful conclusion seems both a ridiculous assumption, and yet, in the same breath, a not implausible one.

We are a den of patriots and rebels to them. The group who signed the petition showed to them that revolution has not passed over and out of Setauket. It has only gone underground.

A full cemetery would be an efficient way of putting down such insurrection. Anything left could be given to established Loyalists to rebuild and run.

What an example such an action would stand as to all of Long Island! To the colonies entire.

Hanging a clergyman, after all, is no doubt but a small step on the way to razing a village.

Already mounted, I turned my horse from the coast road, threw my leg over the saddle, and raced toward Setauket without thought to exhausting or overheating the borrowed beast.

Through no concerted intent, Sally B. had found me a fast mount, and one that was willing to run, no doubt expecting a pleasant arrival with oats and a rub-down once he ran home after his odd night spent in the Horst Wood.

Before Setauket came into sight, black smoke was visible on the horizon. As we drew closer, I was able to discern the destruction was not as vast as I had expected.

At first any figures of people I could see looked tiny and black in the distance. As we grew closer to arriving on the edge of the village, I noted some wore red coats (nearer the church barracks), and some wore blue. Many others scurried about in clothes the color of earth and wood.

I tied up Carrie's horse when I found a tree some distance from the action. I ran past our house—no one was within, not even Cook and the Kitchen Girl. I went next door. No one there, either. The village was empty.

I ran (ridiculously—what was I running toward? Certainly not safety, I had abandoned that when I ran back toward the great thundering) toward the village square.

Across the way—a way littered with men jogging to-and-fro, clearly at some urgent task—several columns of Continentals marching out of the village, I spied you, Ben Tallmadge.

You were too distant to hear any cry I might have spoken toward you, especially over the noise and bustle of the men all about.

But I recognized you in your blue coat, your forelock troubled, askew with whatever opposition you had found on your foray here. It was the sort of unkemptness in appearance a woman longs to put right with a knowing flutter of her hand, smooth into harmony as she might the furrow in a worried brow.

Your uniform was in some disarray. And you were in concentrated conversation with Abraham Woodhull, whom I recognized from the rear by his queue and frockcoat.

I stood, dumbstruck, the back of DeJong's mercantile behind me, awed that you would be here—not knowing how your arrival had come about (nor how long it had lasted). I had set out to find you, to bring you home-and failed, and yet here you were. Without my help, without having received my message.

Surely Providence had intervened for your father's sake.

Both you and Abraham were keenly intent on one another. And why shouldn't you have been? All those years without speaking. And now, in the light of a Setauket morning, here you were, meeting near the common, so like in older days, yet you in your blue coat—and Abraham just having prosecuted your father for the Crown—so unlike.

I could make no decision upon whether your conversation be genial or no. It did not last very long, not long enough for me to un-lock my lower limbs and walk through the dusty fray toward you.

As Abraham walked off, though, my eyes trained to your face, your jaw—I saw your expression pull into a familiar one. That tug of your lips when something had unexpectedly pleased you, given you a pleasurable pause. So quickly done, one had to be quick to observe it.

Whatever Abe had said, you approved of its conclusion. Whatever had taken place, Abe was still your friend. As far as you were concerned, he was still a good man.

Relief, that I had not known I was in need of, flooded through me. There was more at work here than I could have guessed. I did not attempt to make sense of it in that moment, I rested only in the realization that if Abraham had your approval, he had mine as well.

Your expression was just beginning to fade, when your eyes cast about, and found me—and mine, across the distance separating us.

After an interval of surprise, yours seemed to hold a question of curious query: what was I doing here, out among this military bustle (for I had by then discerned the men not in blue but in forest-dark colors were also part of your assault on Setauket) when the rest of the village was elsewhere?

Before I could open my mouth to shout across the distance, I recalled my cap. I reached up and grabbed it away, lest you take me for the married woman I had intended to playact at being. It seemed very important that you did not so mistake me, mistake what had become of me.

I grabbed it off my head, all haste and ungainly effort-not intending to, but with the rough and tumble night spent upon the forest's floor, also losing the hair pins that had kept my coiffure in place.

My hair caught the wind and tumbled down, a terrible mess, kempt only insofar as it had not tangled, courtesy of the cap.

Your face leapt into a grin at this. (Surely, you were thinking: Jenny, yet again making a near-disaster of herself.) And your right foot set off in my direction.

But your left was not to follow. A clutch of men descended upon you, no doubt reminding you that you had no time for further detours on your departure from Setauket. As if in a whirlwind, you were spirited away. Moments later, had you thought to once again look in my direction, you would no longer have found me, nor I you.

And thus the Continentals withdrew from the Battle of Setauket. The villagers I found, for the most part, sequestered within the Tavern.

Lucas Brewster, and two others that signed the petition were killed by the King's Men. (Lucas murdered by Captain Simcoe, others felled when they joined in the skirmish.)

Thom Brown and others (even ones who had not signed the petition) escaped with the blue coats. No doubt to join up.

With my family I am reconciled and returned.

No news has reached us of Sally B. and Carrie Brewster's horse, for good or for ill.

Cleopas I have sent to return Carrie Brewster's other horse, with a note of condolence regarding her uncle (whose body she cannot even have to bury), and a request to call on her later in the week.

Abraham Woodhull's story does not end with the Battle, but I shall save the specifics of that narrative for another time. The shock of Selah Strong having been not only alive, but among the Continentals. The shock to Anna Strong, and his embrace of her passionately and publicly. A man who had been to the _Jersey_ returned, alive.

The burning of Abraham's farm, which many a Setauketer now credits to Selah, as Anna Strong jumped from the rebel boats and into what are reported to be Abraham's arms, before the very eyes of her husband.

In fact, I am wise enough now to know that I must tear from these pages once written any reference to your approval of Abraham; I must do so, and I must see it burned, for it would damn him were it to be found, surely. Henceforth any reference to him shall be rendered as dully and un-insightfully as can be crafted. For the safety of your best friend. For the safety of whatever Abe's part in your life might yet be.

I have thought of you standing there, Benjamin Tallmadge, back on Setauket ground, where you had so comfortably belonged, part of the warp and weft of our lives. Of how your queue had grown from barely-there when you left us, to a very fashionable length at present. I have felt dismay that we were not near enough one another to speak, nor for me to again gaze upon the color of your eyes.

I have puzzled over and over in my head how you knew to return here—and when.

In hopes of discovering what impelled your trip, I returned again to our boathouse, to the cabinet there. The diary book I had positioned—which was still in its place at the time I left the village for Horst Wood-is there no more. It has been removed, albeit not in time to have brought you here.

Taking its place was but a small sliver of paper, clearly torn from a diary page. So small as to go unnoticed save by one scouring that cabinet for evidence of a book no longer there. Scrawled upon it in smeary pencil (no doubt from a forest-dark coat, its pockets still slick with whale oil), the marking, "S - - dead". No date.

And so Reverend Tallmadge is saved, and his son. And yet not his son, nor the Reverend and you saved from the grief of Samuel's passing.

Nor Caleb. Nor Carrie and he from Lucas'.

I imagine you in your father's embrace after so much time apart, after such dire happenings. After a time when he could not have known you as alive or dead. The expression on Reverend Tallmadge's face to be with his son. How he has always loved you!

How the two of you would help Caleb as he works to bury Lucas, the words ancient and holy you would say over his uncle's grave.

And then the moment, the bleak moment you must tell the Reverend. That despite your joy at being reunited, you shall never be a whole family again.

That the King has taken yet one more thing away from you. And that with no amount of fighting can it ever be regained.

Oh, Samuel. I wish to never see a red coat again.


End file.
